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Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 C.A. Callahan
Wiley Publishing, Inc.
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Acquisitions Editor: Thomas Cirtin Development Editor: Lisa Thibault Technical Editors: James Kelly, Kevin Lundy, Daniel Galant, Vanessa Williams Production Editor: Christine O’Connor Copy Editor: Kathy Carlyle Production Manager: Tim Tate Vice President and Executive Group Publisher: Richard Swadley Vice President and Executive Publisher: Joseph B. Wikert Vice President and Publisher: Neil Edde Book Designer: Maureen Forys and Judy Fung Compositor: Aptara Proofreaders: Nancy Hanger, Nancy Riddiough, Ian Golder, and Amy McCarthy Indexer: Ted Laux Cover Designer: Ryan Sneed Cover Image: Pete Gardner / Digital Vision/ gettyimage Copyright C 2008 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana Published simultaneously in Canada ISBN: 978-0-470-12728-5 No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning or otherwise, except as permitted under Sections 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, (978) 750-8400, fax (978) 646-8600. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Legal Department, Wiley Publishing, Inc., 10475 Crosspoint Blvd., Indianapolis, IN 46256, (317) 572-3447, fax (317) 572-4355, or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: The publisher and the author make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation warranties of fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales or promotional materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for every situation. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering legal, accounting, or other professional services. If professional assistance is required, the services of a competent professional person should be sought. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom. The fact that an organization or Website is referred to in this work as a citation and/or a potential source of further information does not mean that the author or the publisher endorses the information the organization or Website may provide or recommendations it may make. Further, readers should be aware that Internet Websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. For general information on our other products and services or to obtain technical support, please contact our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at (800) 762-2974, outside the U.S. at (317) 572-3993 or fax (317) 572-4002. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Callahan, C. A., 1967– Windows SharePoint services 3.0 / C.A. Callahan. p.
cm.
Includes index. ISBN 978-0-470-12728-5 (paper/website) 1. Intranets (Computer networks) TK5105.875.I6C345
2. Web servers.
I. Title.
2008
004.6 82–dc22
2007032142
TRADEMARKS: Wiley, the Wiley logo, and the Sybex logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and/or its affiliates, in the United States and other countries, and may not be used without written permission. Microsoft, Windows, and SharePoint are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Wiley Publishing, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
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Dear Reader Thank you for choosing Mastering Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. This book is part of a family of premium quality Sybex books, all written by outstanding authors who combine practical experience with a gift for teaching. Sybex was founded in 1976. More than thirty years later, we’re still committed to producing consistently exceptional books. With each of our titles we’re working hard to set a new standard for the industry. From the paper we print on, to the authors we work with, our goal is to bring you the best books available. I hope you see all that reflected in these pages. I’d be very interested to hear your comments and get your feedback on how we’re doing. Feel free to let me know what you think about this or any other Sybex book by sending me an email at
[email protected], or if you think you’ve found a technical error in this book, please visit http://sybex.custhelp.com. Customer feedback is critical to our efforts at Sybex. Best regards,
Neil Edde Vice President and Publisher Sybex, an Imprint of Wiley
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To Charles for his patience, strength, and determination. This will teach you to brag about a book before it is written. Thanks for having my back.
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Acknowledgments I’d like to thank the people who helped me out during the, at times, overwhelming quest to write this book. Most books are not written alone, but this particular book has a fair number of people who stepped up to assist when deadlines were tight and the work was hard. I’d like to show my gratitude for: The reviewers, who reviewed my edits for me after I had pneumonia and found myself in the terrible predicament of having no time to do them personally: Karla Carter (Chapters 5 and 6), Brian Bridson (Chapters 4 and 9), Gareth Rowlands (and his wife Sheila Graven, Chapters 3 and 14), James Finley, (who reviewed his own work, Chapter 13), and, of course, Charles Firth, who reviewed Chapters 7, 8, 10, 11, and 12 (good job, man). The people who tackled the task of writing a Chapter or two: Ron Freeman, who wrote Chapter 14 at lightning speed; Bill Chapman, who laid the foundation of Chapter 11, and Charles Firth, who filled it in; James Finley who wrote Chapter 13; and Charles Firth again for also writing Chapters 7 and 8 (now you can see why the book is dedicated to him). The editors, Lisa Thibault (development) and Jim Kelly (technical), for their tireless efforts to provide comments and feedback. The production editor, Christine O’Connor, who didn’t expect the whirlwind of reviewers and technical editors; yet handled the situation with kindness and grace. The additional, and extraordinary, technical editors; Vanessa Williams (thanks for the advice and support); Daniel Galant, who truly is gallant (thanks for answering my call for help); and Kevin Lundy, who inherited a lot of work at the very end of the project and did an amazing job. And, especially, Kathy Carlyle, to whom I’ve never even spoken; for doing a fast, outstanding job as copy editor. Thank you for that. I appreciate the efforts you all have made. For better or worse, we have created a book. Each person on this page left their mark on the work they did, and I thank them for it.
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About the Author CA Callahan, MCSE, MCSA, MCT, is the founder and principal trainer for CallahanTech, providing customized training and courseware for businesses and IT professionals. A Microsoft Certified Trainer since the Windows NT Server days, Callahan teaches fellow IT professionals about the latest Microsoft technologies. She’s a frequent presenter at conferences and expos, including Windows/Office Connections and LinuxWorld/NetworkWorld Expo; with a brief stint instructing hands-on labs at Microsoft TechEd. Previously, she traveled across the US on behalf of Microsoft to do TechNet Security Briefings, and has become passionate about network access security, disaster recovery, and virtualization. An avid beta tester, she has participated in such notable betas as Server 2003 (as well as SP1 and R2), Server 2008, Vista, Virtual Server, and Data Protection Manager. Callahan is a contributing author of Windows Vista: The Missing Manual with David Pogue as well as Mastering Windows Server 2003 and its Upgrade Edition for SP1 and R2 with Mark Minasi.
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Contents at a Glance Introduction .............................................................................................. xxi
Part I r Preparing for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Chapter 1 r Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Under the Hood ...............................
1 3
Chapter 2 r Installation ..................................................................................... 31
Part II r Using Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 Chapter 3 r Introduction to the SharePoint Interface.............................................. 135 Chapter 4 r Introduction to Web Parts ................................................................. 159 Chapter 5 r Introduction to Lists ........................................................................ 201 Chapter 6 r Introduction to Libraries...................................................................323 Chapter 7 r Sites, Subsites, and Workspaces ......................................................... 417 Chapter 8 r Site Collections and Web Applications ................................................ 497
Part III r Administering Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 563 Chapter 9 r Central Administration: Operations ................................................... 565 Chapter 10 r Central Administration: Application Management.............................. 613 Chapter 11 r Users and Permissions .................................................................... 653 Chapter 12 r Maintenance and Monitoring........................................................... 711
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Part IV r Special Topics in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 805 Chapter 13 r STSADM: A Look at the SharePoint Command Line Tool..................... 807 Chapter 14 r Migrating from WSS 2.0 to WSS 3.0 .................................................. 865 Chapter 15 r Advanced Installation and Configuration .......................................... 901 Appendix r The Bottom Line ........................................................................... 1013
Index.......................................................................................................1035
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Contents Introduction .............................................................................................. xxi
Part I r Preparing for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1
Chapter 1 r Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Under the Hood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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Software Requirements............................................................................. Installing SharePoint: Single Server and Server Farm ... ..................................... SharePoint Sites and Databases................................................................... Content Databases............................................................................... SharePoint Service Accounts and Services ..................................................... Service Accounts. ................................................................................ SharePoint Services.............................................................................. User Account Modes................................................................................ Authentication Types ............................................................................... Authentication Methods ........................................................................... SharePoint Search ................................................................................... SharePoint and Email............................................................................... Alternate Access Mapping......................................................................... Managed Paths....................................................................................... User Accounts and Permissions .................................................................. Hardware Requirements . .......................................................................... Performance Planning .......................................................................... Storage Planning................................................................................. Software Limitations ............................................................................ The Bottom Line .....................................................................................
4 6 9 10 11 11 13 14 15 16 16 20 21 21 22 22 23 25 27 29
Chapter 2 r Installation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 Preparing for the SharePoint Installation ....................................................... IIS 6.0 with SMTP................................................................................ ASP .NET 2.0 and .NET Framework 3.0..................................................... Setup Account.... ................................................................................ Service Accounts................................................................................. Basic Installation..................................................................................... Confirming the Installation of the Windows Internal Databases ....................... Checking IIS for Web Site Creation........................................................... Checking SharePoint’s Services ............................................................... Checking the Central Administration Site ..................................................
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31 32 35 37 42 45 50 51 55 56
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Advanced Server Farm Installation .............................................................. 57 Launching Central Administration .......................................................... 71 Checking the SharePoint Databases.......................................................... 73 Confirming Database Creation................................................................ 73 Confirming the Changes to IIS ................................................................ 77 Confirming SharePoint Services and Local Security Groups.................................................................................. 80 Checking the Index Files ....................................................................... 86 Finalizing the Server Farm Installation...................................................... 89 Post-Installation Configuration Tasks ....................................................... 113 The Bottom Line ...... ............................................................................... 130
Part II r Using Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133 Chapter 3 r Introduction to the SharePoint Interface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135 Team Site Home Page............................................................................... Home Page Anatomy ........................................................................... Content Pages ........................................................................................ A Quick Look at a List .......................................................................... A Quick Look at a Document Library ....................................................... The Action Bar ................................................................................... The Bottom Line .....................................................................................
135 136 150 151 152 153 156
Chapter 4 r Introduction to Web Parts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 Exploring Web Parts ................................................................................ Using Edit Mode..................................................................................... Move a Web Part................................................................................. Remove a Web Part from a Zone ............................................................. Add a List View Web Part...................................................................... Reset Page Content .............................................................................. Working with Web Parts ........................................................................... Default Web Parts ............................................................................... Add User-Aware Web Parts.................................................................... Change Web Part Settings...................................................................... Add a Built-In Web Part ........................................................................ Configure a Built-In Web Part ................................................................. Export a Web Part ............................................................................... Import a Web Part to a Single Page .......................................................... Import a Web Part to a Site Collection Gallery............................................. Add a Web Part from a Site Collection Gallery ............................................ Close a Web Part ................................................................................. Return a Closed Web Part to a Page.......................................................... Delete a Web Part ................................................................................ The Bottom Line .....................................................................................
159 161 163 164 166 167 168 169 171 172 176 176 181 184 189 192 193 194 195 198
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Chapter 5 r Introduction to Lists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 What Is a List?........................................................................................ Views............................................................................................... Common Data.... ................................................................................ Explore a List ..................................................................................... Create a New List Item ............................................................................. View a List Item...................................................................................... Edit a List Item ....................................................................................... Modify a List View .................................................................................. Add an Existing List Field to a View ......................................................... Remove a Field from a View................................................................... Change the Order of Fields in a View........................................................ Modify a List ......................................................................................... Add a Field to a List............................................................................. Change the Order of Fields in a List ......................................................... Enter Data via Datasheet View.................................................................... Create a New List View to Group by Category ................................................ Create a New View to Filter by Category ....................................................... Customize a List ..... ................................................................................ Enable Incoming Email ......................................................................... Enable Content Approval ...................................................................... Check the RSS Feed Settings................................................................... Set Alerts .......................................................................................... Explore Prebuilt Lists ... ............................................................................ Calendar........................................................................................... Links ............................................................................................... Tasks ............... ................................................................................ Team Discussion ................................................................................. Create New Lists with Existing Templates ..................................................... Issue Tracking .................................................................................... Surveys ............................................................................................ Contacts ........................................................................................... Create a Custom List................................................................................ Edit an Existing Field ........................................................................... Add a Person or Group Field.................................................................. Add Single-Line Text and Currency Fields ................................................. Add a Lookup Field............................................................................. Add a Custom Site Column ................................................................... The Bottom Line .....................................................................................
201 201 202 204 205 208 212 213 215 216 216 218 221 224 229 236 243 244 248 253 256 258 264 264 267 269 273 278 279 291 297 310 312 313 314 315 315 321
Chapter 6 r Introduction to Libraries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323 What Are Libraries?................................................................................. Upload a Document. ................................................................................ Create a New Document . .......................................................................... Add a Required Field to a Library ............................................................... Edit a Document with a Required Field......................................................... Opening or Viewing the Library with Windows Explorer...................................
323 326 328 332 334 338
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Require Check Out .................................................................................. Check Out a Document......................................................................... Check In a Document ........................................................................... Discard Check Out .............................................................................. Manage Checked Out Files .................................................................... Versioning ............................................................................................ Create a New Minor Version of a Document ............................................... Create a New Major Version of a Document ............................................... Unpublish a Major Version .................................................................... Restore a Previous Version of a Document ................................................. Content Approval ............................................................................... Create a Document Library........................................................................ Replacing a Library’s Template with an Existing Template ............................. Send To ................................................................................................ Content Types ........................................................................................ Enable Content Types........................................................................... Create a New Content Type ................................................................... Picture Library ....................................................................................... Wiki Page Library ................................................................................... Form Library ......................................................................................... The Bottom Line .....................................................................................
343 344 350 351 352 355 358 359 361 362 365 376 379 383 393 395 396 405 407 410 414
Chapter 7 r Sites, Subsites, and Workspaces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 417 Definitions and Concepts .......................................................................... Creating a New Subsite ............................................................................ Site Settings............ ............................................................................... Users and Permissions.......................................................................... Look and Feel .................................................................................... Galleries ........................................................................................... Site Administration ............................................................................. Site Collection Administration ................................................................ Additional Default Site Templates .. ............................................................. Team Site ........... ............................................................................... Document Workspace .......................................................................... Wiki ................................................................................................ Blog.. ............................................................................................... Meeting Workspace ............................................................................. Even More Sites ..................................................................................... Application Templates.......................................................................... Self-Service Site Creation....................................................................... The Bottom Line ...... ...............................................................................
417 419 422 423 424 439 443 458 464 464 465 466 470 472 484 484 491 496
Chapter 8 r Site Collections and Web Applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 497 Site Collections........ ............................................................................... Creating a Site Collection ...................................................................... Site Collection Site Settings .................................................................... Configuring Site Collections...................................................................
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Web Applications.................................................................................... Creating a New Web Application ............................................................ Web Application Settings ...................................................................... Content Databases............................................................................... Anonymous Access ............................................................................. Host Headers ..................................................................................... Alternate Access Mapping ..................................................................... The Bottom Line .....................................................................................
516 517 525 535 540 547 550 560
Part III r Administering Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 563 Chapter 9 r Central Administration: Operations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 565 Central Administration Organization ........................................................... Operations ............................................................................................ Topology and Services .......................................................................... Security Configuration Settings............................................................... Logging and Reporting ......................................................................... Global Configuration ........................................................................... Backup and Restore ............................................................................. Data Configuration.............................................................................. The Bottom Line .....................................................................................
565 569 571 575 581 587 602 609 610
Chapter 10 r Central Administration: Application Management . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 613 Overview.............................................................................................. Sharepoint Web Application Management ..................................................... Create Or Extend Web Application .......................................................... Remove SharePoint from an IIS Web Site ................................................... Delete Web Application ........................................................................ Define Managed Paths.......................................................................... Web Application Outgoing E-Mail Settings ................................................ Web Application General Settings............................................................ Content Databases............................................................................... Manage Web Application Features........................................................... Web Application List............................................................................ Application Security ................................................................................ Security for Web Part Pages ................................................................... Self-Service Site Management ................................................................. User Permissions for Web Application ...................................................... Policy for Web Application .................................................................... Authentication Providers ...................................................................... Workflow Management ............................................................................ Workflow Settings ............................................................................... SharePoint Site Management...................................................................... Create Site Collection ........................................................................... Delete Site Collection ...........................................................................
613 615 615 617 618 619 621 622 625 628 628 628 628 628 629 629 637 639 639 639 640 640
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Site Use Confirmation and Deletion ......................................................... Quota Templates ................................................................................. Site Collection Quotas and Locks............................................................. Site Collection Administrators ................................................................ Site Collection List............................................................................... External Service Connections ..................................................................... Records Center ................................................................................... HTML Viewer ..... ............................................................................... Document Conversions......................................................................... The Bottom Line ...... ...............................................................................
642 644 645 646 647 647 647 648 649 650
Chapter 11 r Users and Permissions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 653 What Are Users, Groups, and Permissions? ................................................... Individual Permissions.. ........................................................................... Permission Levels ................................................................................... Manage Permission Levels..................................................................... Users and Groups ................................................................................... Editing Site Administrators.................................................................... Viewing People and Groups................................................................... Creating a New SharePoint Group ........................................................... Adding a Domain User or Domain Group to a SharePoint Group... .................. Removing a Domain User or Domain Group from a SharePoint Group................................................................................ Viewing All People .............................................................................. Applying Permissions .............................................................................. Inheritance ........................................................................................ Change Subsite Permissions................................................................... Change List or Library Permissions.......................................................... Change List Item or Library Item Permissions............................................. Planning User Access ............................................................................... User Access at the Web Application Level.................................................. User Access at the Site Collection Level ..................................................... The Bottom Line .....................................................................................
653 656 663 666 675 676 678 683 686 688 689 691 691 694 701 703 705 706 706 709
Chapter 12 r Maintenance and Monitoring . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 711 Performance Monitor ............................................................................... Adding a Counter to System Monitor . ...................................................... Creating a Counter Log ........................................................................ Setting a Performance Counter Alert . ....................................................... IIS Logs ................. ............................................................................... Event Viewer ......................................................................................... Common Application Event Errors .......................................................... Backing Up and Restoring SharePoint .......................................................... Back Up SharePoint ............................................................................. Restore SharePoint .............................................................................. Back Up a Site Collection....................................................................... Restore a Site Collection........................................................................
711 712 715 723 726 729 730 732 734 738 746 750
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Export and Import Site Collections and Subsites .......................................... Back Up an Individual Subsite to a Template .............................................. Restore an Individual Subsite from a Template.. .......................................... Back Up a List or Library Template .......................................................... Restore a List or Library Template ........................................................... Backup and Restore Using Other Tools ......................................................... Back Up the IIS Metabase ...................................................................... Restore the IIS Metabase ....................................................................... Back Up a Web Application by Saving its Configuration File........................... Restore a Web Application Using a Configuration File .................................. Back Up Virtual Directories and SharePoint’s folders .................................... Restore a Virtual Directory from Backup ................................................... Backup Standalone Server Databases........................................................ Backup Your SQL Databases in a Server Farm Install .................................... Restore a SQL Database ........................................................................ Suggested Recovery Scenarios .................................................................... For a Full Recovery of a Single Server Installation ........................................ For a Web Front End Server ................................................................... For a Full Recovery of a Server farm.. ....................................................... The Bottom Line ..... ................................................................................
751 758 763 766 768 771 771 773 774 775 777 783 785 789 792 795 795 797 798 802
Part IV r Special Topics in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 805 Chapter 13 r STSADM: A Look at the SharePoint Command Line Tool . . . . . . . . . . . 807 STSADM Setup Information ...................................................................... STSADM.EXE Inline Help ......................................................................... STSADM-Only Tasks ............................................................................... Site Template Management with STSADM.EXE .............................................. Adding a Template to the Server Farm ...................................................... Listing the Site Templates for the Farm ..................................................... Deleting Site Templates......................................................................... Managing Web Parts with STSADM. ............................................................ Adding a Web Part Package ................................................................... Listing Web Part Packs ......................................................................... Removing Web Part Packages... .............................................................. Managing Features and Solutions with STSADM............................................. Adding Solutions ................................................................................ Deleting Solutions ............................................................................... Deployment of Solutions ....................................................................... Upgrading Solutions ............................................................................ Adding Features . ................................................................................ Activating/Deactivating Features............................................................ Web Application Management ... ................................................................ Creating a Web Application ................................................................... Removing Web Applications .................................................................. Listing Your Web Applications ...............................................................
808 810 813 814 814 815 816 817 818 820 820 821 823 824 824 826 826 826 828 830 833 833
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Ongoing Management and Maintenance ................................................... !New Content Icon .............................................................................. Database Management ............................................................................. Connecting and Disconnecting Databases .................................................. Search Management . ............................................................................... Searching Content in More Than One Language .......................................... Managing the Search Service .................................................................. Moving the Index................................................................................ Action! ............................................................................................. Site and Subweb Management.................................................................... Listing Site Collections and Sites ............................................................. Creating Site Collections and Sites .. ......................................................... Renaming a Site .................................................................................. Deleting Site Collections and Sites .. ......................................................... Security Management .............................................................................. User Management ............................................................................... SharePoint Group Management .............................................................. Permission Policy Management .............................................................. Site Locks.......................................................................................... Farm Management ... ............................................................................... The Bottom Line ...... ...............................................................................
834 837 837 840 843 844 845 845 846 848 849 852 854 854 854 856 857 858 858 859 863
Chapter 14 r Migrating from WSS 2.0 to WSS 3.0 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 865 Migration Basics ..................................................................................... The Joy of Justification: Why Migrate? ...................................................... Which Way to the New World? Types of Upgrades....................................... Preparing for the Migration: What do I Need in Place?...................................... Check the Software.............................................................................. Define Your Key Sharepoint Users ........................................................... Define Your Regression Testing ............................................................... Document Everything .......................................................................... Communication Is Key ......................................................................... Evaluate Custom Web Parts ................................................................... Keep Rollbacks in Place ........................................................................ Consider Improving the System .............................................................. Performing the Migration: Can I Get My Hands Dirty Now? .............................. Migration In Place ............................................................................... Gradual Migration .............................................................................. SQL Server Database Move Migration ...................................................... Database Move Migration: WMSDE to WID ............................................... Post-Update Steps: Testing for success .......................................................... The Bottom Line .....................................................................................
866 866 867 871 872 873 873 873 873 874 874 875 876 879 884 894 898 899 900
Chapter 15 r Advanced Installation and Configuration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 901 Advanced Installation .............................................................................. Active Directory Account Creation Mode SharePoint Installation... .................. Using SharePoint in Active Directory ....................................................... Installing an Additional SharePoint Server on a Server Farm ..........................
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Advanced Configuration........................................................................... 942 Network Load Balancing the Server Farm.................................................. 942 Using SSL with SharePoint .................................................................... 961 Using Kerberos for Authentication... ........................................................ 977 Directory Management Service ............................................................... 984 The Bottom Line ..................................................................................... 1012
Appendix r The Bottom Line . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1013 Chapter 1: Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Under the Hood ............................. 1013 Chapter 2: Installation .............................................................................. 1014 Chapter 3: Introduction to the SharePoint Interface .......................................... 1015 Chapter 4: Introduction to Web Parts............................................................1016 Chapter 5: Introduction to Lists .................................................................. 1017 Chapter 6: Introduction to Libraries ............................................................. 1018 Chapter 7: Sites, Subsites, and Workspaces.....................................................1020 Chapter 8: Site Collections and Web Applications ............................................ 1021 Chapter 9: Central Administrations: Operations .............................................. 1023 Chapter 10: Central Administration: Application Management ........................... 1024 Chapter 11: Users and Permissions .............................................................. 1026 Chapter 12: Maintenance and Monitoring ...................................................... 1028 Chapter 13: STSADM: A Look at the SharePoint Command Line Tool ................... 1029 Chapter 14: Migrating from WSS 2.0 to WSS 3.0 .............................................. 1031 Chapter 15: Advanced Installation and Configuration.......................................1032
Index.......................................................................................................1035
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Introduction This book started off as a single 200-page chapter in someone else’s book. Almost a year later, and a different version of SharePoint, this book was born. Mastering Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 was intended for IT administrators to get a handle on Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. Most of us don’t have time to waste struggling with the ins and outs of a new product. We just need it to work. SharePoint is a really complicated beast; poorly documented, with oddly named settings, in even odder places. It’s not for the faint of heart. SharePoint is several things at once. It is a developer’s platform, leveraging ASP .NET 2.0 and the Windows Workflow Foundation. It is a robust front end over the power of SQL 2000 or 2005 on the backend. And finally, it’s a web collaboration tool, a useful front end to help increase the productivity of the IT worker. It’s a network product, installs on a server, and inevitably ends up being the responsibility of the server administrator. When I started using Windows SharePoint Services (WSS), I just couldn’t find any detailed, accurate, WSS-only documentation. There was almost nothing reliable out there that was for administrators using WSS (not the paid for SharePoint Server product). Most of the documentation, especially the books, that I could find about WSS were written for developers. There was almost nothing for the busy administrators who have an entire network to run, for whom WSS is just another server role. So when I was asked to write about WSS for IT professionals, I couldn’t say no (well, I considered it, but I finally agreed because the cause was good). That’s why this book is here. I wrote it because it was the book I needed when I started out. It is the book I would have bought if it had been available when I was looking. I tried to fill it full of suggestions, tips, tricks, and concepts that would help you navigate through the maze of hype about SharePoint to reach the truth—what it really is, what it really does, and how to use it. The intent was not particularly to hold your hand, but to show you, administrator to administrator, what Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is all about.
Contents of the Book So, intrepid IT Professional, Administrator, Student of all things server related, this book was written for you. It takes you through what an administrator should know, part by part, chapter by chapter: Part I: Preparing for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Chapter 1, “Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Under the Hood”: The concepts you need to be prepared for before installing SharePoint; from what installations to expect, to performance and capacity planning, to features that may take extra effort or resources to use. Chapter 2, “Installation”: The different ways to install SharePoint, how to do it, and why.
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Part II: Using Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Chapter 3, “Introduction to the SharePoint Interface”: The landmarks and terminology of the interface itself. Chapter 4, “Introduction to Web Parts”: What web parts are, what they are for, where you can put them, what the built in ones do, and how to configure them. All without leaving the browser. No development here. Chapter 5, “Introduction to Lists”: What lists are, really. How they work, what they do, how to customize them, build your own, and reuse preexisting lists and templates. Takes a glance at workflows. Chapter 6, “Introduction to Libraries”: What libraries are. How they work, how to customize them, how to make your own. There are several types of libraries, not all of them work they way you expect them to. Chapter 7, “Sites, Subsites, and Workspaces”: What subsites and workspaces are, how to create them, and how to use them. What site templates are, and how to use the application templates for SharePoint version 3.0 from Microsoft. Chapter 8, “Site Collections and Web Applications”: What site collections and web applications are. Moving up to the big stuff; learn how and why to create new site collections or even new web applications, extend existing web applications, and how alternate access mapping works. Part III: Administering Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Chapter 9, “Central Administration: Operations”: The first of two reference chapters covering the Central Administration pages and how to administer SharePoint. Explains what Central Administration is, and how to use it. What settings are on the Operations page and what each one does, from Servers on the server farm, to Data retrieval service. Chapter 10, “Central Administration: Application Management”: Primarily about how to manage web applications, this reference chapter covers what settings are on the Application Management page in Central Administration. How to use them, when to use them, and what they’re for. Chapter 11, “Users and Permissions”: An in-depth look at individual permissions and their levels, user and group management, and configuration of authorization options. Includes using Policy for Web Applications to secure web applications, restricting site collections using permissions and groups, as well as securing lists and list items. Chapter 12, “Maintenance and Monitoring”: How to monitor, back up and restore SharePoint. How to recover from disaster; from using the recycle bin to recover a lost list item, to rebuilding the server farm. Part IV: Special Topics in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Chapter 13, “STSADM: A Look at a SharePoint Command Line Tool”: How to manage SharePoint using the command line administrative tool, STSADM. See how to do more than the Central Administration web site will allow—there’s always more power at the command line.
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Chapter 14, “Migrating from WSS 2.0 to WSS 3.0”: How to migrate to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 from Windows SharePoint Services 2.0. Get tips and tricks about the different types of migration options. Chapter 15, “Advanced Installation and Configuration”: How to do some of the more advanced configuration, from network load balancing to using Active Directory Account Creation mode to enabling Directory Management Service. Do the fancy administrative tasks that others hesitate to do. In order to write about SharePoint, I found myself writing about doing SharePoint. So there are lots of screenshots and step by step instructions. The way to learn about SharePoint is by using it. It really doesn’t make sense until you do. So this isn’t a high level book all about the theory of SharePoint—that would be too easy. No, this is largely a real life scenario, tutorial kind of book, chronicling what I know about SharePoint, as quickly as possible. This book is intended to give you solid insight into how things work, how to do them, and how to understand them well enough that you can take ownership of SharePoint as an IT administrator. It was a slow, painstaking process to explore all those dark places, set all of those settings, and take all of those screenshots. But the hope is; that if I do it here, however briefly, you will see how it works and then you can apply it in your environment. Of course, despite my best efforts, there were simply some topics I could not cover in the time I had to write the book. But I wanted to give you enough information, enough confidence, that if there was something I didn’t do in the book, you would be able to do it without me. Because of the time constraints, not all chapters were written by me; I had to ask for help. Four remarkable men came forward to give me a hand, and I would like to thank them. Charles Firth, when it looked like I simply would never, ever finish, stepped up and wrote two chapters: Chapter 7, “Sites, Subsites, and Workspaces,” and Chapter 8, “Site Collections and Web Applications.” Chapter 8 turned out to be a beast, overlapping my content in Chapter 10 considerably. Bill Chapman gave me a hand with Chapter 11, “Users and Permissions.” He laid the groundwork for quite a bit of information, and Charles built on it from there. James Finley wrote Chapter 13, the STSADM chapter. I have to give him full credit for that chapter. He did a thorough job introducing the command line tool and covering all those odds and ends that you just can’t do in Central Administration. And finally, Ron Freeman, who wrote the Migrating from WSS 2.0 to WSS 3.0 chapter, Chapter 14. That chapter had some serious hardware requirements, crossing multiple machines, as well as multiple versions of SharePoint. Thanks again to those fine gentlemen for the work they did.
Behind the scenes: The making of Mastering Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 As for the writing of the book: It was done entirely on a MacBook Pro, running Bootcamp, written entirely using a virtual machine running Word 2003 (the publisher’s template required it). For those who like the nitty gritty details, here is a run down of the background of the book as far as network and resources go. The SharePoint network I used throughout the book was run on the MacBook Pro in either Virtual PC 2005 or on a Virtual Server R2. My coauthors accessed virtual machines configured like my own using my Virtual Server in order to have screenshots and step by steps that matched the domain, server, and user naming structure that I was using for the book.
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Well, mostly. James Finley’s in New Zealand (which is on the other side of the planet from where I am writing), and internet access to my machines was a bit intermittent. So if his screenshots aren’t identical to my set up, that’s why. The network configuration for the book: Internal Active Directory Domain: dem0tek.lcl Email domain: dem0tek.com (and a brief foray during a sidebar with dem0share.com) Servers: RR1.dem0tek.lcl: It was the SQL 2005 server for SharePoint. For convenience sake, it was also the Routing and Remote Access Server for the virtual network. I installed Word 2003 and Snag It (by Techsmith) on that machine and wrote all of my content there. DC1.dem0tek.lcl: It was the domain controller and the POP3 email server. For the Directory Management Services section of Chapter 15, I rebuilt the network, and installed Exchange 2003 on DC1 to manage email as well. SP1.dem0tek.lcl: First SharePoint server on the network. It was the Basic installation server used in chapter 2. SP2.dem0tek.lcl: Second SharePoint server on the network. This server is the one installed using the Advanced, Server Farm Configuration and used RR1 for its SharePoint databases. Used for most of the book, it should be familiar to readers. SP3.dem0tek.lcl: SharePoint server installed specifically to play second fiddle to SP2. SP3 was the server added to the SharePoint server farm in chapter 15 to demonstrate load balancing and SharePoint services management. SP4.dem0tek.lcl: Used in Chapter 15 as well, this SharePoint server was installed to use Active Directory Account Creation mode. And a fine job it did at that. There are a number of user accounts that show up throughout the book but in fact there are numerous users for the dem0tek network that didn’t really get any recognition. Doing my best to create fictitious names that were truly fictitious, I created names in a few broad categories, most notably herbs and semi-precious stones (believe it or not). The herbs were, by and large, the Information workers (although several of them, particularly Saffron, are power users). The semiprecious stones were staff and IT technicians. Because most of my work was done at the administrative level, I tended to login as an administrator or site collection owner, but there were other accounts available to log in with if necessary. You might recognize Saffron, Jasper, and Citrine when you see them. So now you know what was going on in the background during the writing of this book. For more information, questions, or suggestions, please feel free to email me at callahan@ callahantech.com. I’ve also got a blog if you’d like to stop by at http://servergrrl. blogspot.com. I created it specifically to support this book. It is there that I will write all the stuff that I didn’t get a chance to here (including late breaking information, like changes caused by Service Pack 1 or Server 2008); add more concepts, fix any errata that may turn up (hey, we’re all human here), and more. And if this book ends up with a second edition, you can hear about it there, and even offer me suggestions as to what should be in it, that second time around.
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There’s SharePoint and There’s SharePoint I tend to refer to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 (WSS 3.0) as SharePoint in this book for readability, convenience, and because I am not fond of using the same acronym in practically every sentence for more than a few hundred pages. However, there are two kinds of SharePoint: Windows SharePoint Services and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS). And because of that, you will see WSS being used only when I need to make it clear which kind I am referring to. It should stand to reason that I will default to SharePoint meaning WSS, since that is the topic of the book. There is a lot of confusion about the difference between WSS and MOSS. Many people seem to confuse the two. Remember, MOSS is an add-on to WSS. Users who have access to MOSS tend to consider WSS only as a means to use the more extensive MOSS. They never realize that the features they use daily are not the parts they paid for. Just to be clear, using WSS and MOSS is not entirely an either/or situation. They are basically two different products, but there is a relationship there. WSS is free and is a complete product by itself. After WSS is installed, it will work perfectly fine on its own. However, if you buy and install MOSS, WSS 3.0 is installed first and then MOSS is installed on top of WSS (this is an automated part of the MOSS installation). Microsoft Office SharePoint Services 2007 requires Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 to be installed before it will even run. WSS does not need MOSS, but MOSS does need WSS. Windows SharePoint Services 3.0’s functions are the foundation of all things MOSS. Without WSS, MOSS would not work. They are considered to be two different products, but MOSS is an add-on to WSS. When you pay for MOSS, you pay for the extras it offers in addition to the usefulness of WSS.
WSS 3.0 Features So what can WSS 3.0 really do? Here’s a brief overview of WSS capabilities. There may be features like smart tags that you might not be familiar with right now, but don’t worry, they are covered in depth later in the book. This is to give you an idea of what to look forward to, clearly define what WSS can do without MOSS, and possibly introduce you to something that you might need that you didn’t realize it was capable of. Real-Time Presence and Collaboration If Microsoft Office (2007 is recommended) is installed and Microsoft’s instant messenger is running, Online Presence will allow users to see if their buddy’s from SharePoint are online. In addition, Smart Tags will be available wherever a user name is displayed, offering users a menu to send email or instant messages, and to call that user. Office Communicator and Live Communication Server also help facilitate Online Presence. Consistent User interface With WSS 3.0, the SharePoint interface has been improved, enhancing the consistent look and feel of SharePoint sites, lists, and libraries with automatic breadcrumbs, improved Quick Launch bar, Tree view, Top link bar for navigating sites, and more descriptive menus. The enhancements allow users to more easily navigate backward and forward through sites and pages. Collaboration Site Templates WSS 3.0 includes easy-to-use, easy-to-create team sites, document workspaces, meeting workspaces, blogs, wikis, and even blank sites.
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Wikis New to WSS 3.0, this site template is a creative forum for brainstorming, using knowledge bases, or simply gathering ideas. Wikis make it easy to create, edit, annotate, link pages, and track contributions and changes in a dynamic, collaborative environment. Blogs Also new to WSS 3.0, this site template is a publishing-oriented site intended for posting articles, making comments, and archiving, with RSS feed generation. People and Groups List Another new feature for WSS 3.0, this list is a unified place to find people, add users, manage permissions, and create groups. It integrates with lists and libraries, and offers people-picker functionality. It allows more customizable fields for user information and is security filtered. Calendars Enhanced for WSS 3.0, calendars allow shared views of events; supporting recurring events, all day events, and richer calendar views. Email Integration In addition to being able to send out invitations, notifications, and alerts, WSS 3.0 can enable lists such as discussions, libraries, and announcements to receive incoming email and process them as list items. WSS 3.0 has extensible support for custom email handlers to add incoming email to custom lists as well. SharePoint’s incoming email can integrate with Active Directory and Exchange 2003 to create contacts for list and libraries, as well as SharePoint group distribution lists. Task Coordination Enhanced with a Gantt Chart view for project tasks, the Tasks list supports lightweight task management with task assignment, scheduling, prioritizing, task relationships, and status. Surveys Can be used to collect statistical data that is generated by user responses to custom lists of questions. WSS 3.0 Surveys come with useful graphical views and supports branching logic. Document Collaboration Libraries allow users to save, upload, and store documents (as well as pictures, forms, and other files) online. Document libraries support required check out, versioning (major and minor), multiple content types, Explorer view, and workflows. Issue Tracking Like task coordination, this type of list supports issue assignment, status, priority, issue relationship, and scheduling. It also comes with a default, three-part workflow, and category assignment. Mobile Device Support Using a simplified text layout, WSS 3.0 can support page rendering on international and North American web-enabled phones. Most content pages have an alternate page rendered specifically for Mobile Device user access. Office Integration WSS 3.0 was built in conjunction with Office 2007 to offer the most integrated features ever available with SharePoint. Users can easily access and edit files stored in SharePoint, create links between lists and Access 2007, or upload and download lists and data from Excel 2007. Office also enhances smart tag and presence capabilities. Outlook 2007 further integrates with SharePoint, synchronizing with document libraries, calendars, and lists. It offers read/write access to calendars, tasks, discussions, and documents, and it can create meeting workspaces from Outlook Calendar events, and rollup views of calendars and lists across sites. It offers a unified view of tasks between Outlook and those in SharePoint. Office 2003 integration is still supported, but Office 2007 was designed to offer more robust features. Search Search is managed by SharePoint in this new version, which offers a simple, clear, yet powerful user interface for search queries. Searches can include a site collection, or be narrowed
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down to just one list. Lists, libraries, and sites can be secured so that they are unsearchable, and search results will display only content that the user has the right to see. Users can query for keywords in the text of documents and lists, as well as in the metadata of SharePoint items. Content Management When users edit a document, enhanced content management (integrated between Office 2007 and WSS 3.0) offers a content panel that makes it easier for users to edit the document properties while working on the document in Word. Alerts Users can set alerts for changes in any list or library, and they can be notified by email when those changes occur, eliminating the need to check the list or library manually. Task Notification This feature allows users to receive email notification if a task is assigned to them. Further, there is a new web part that can be used to display all tasks assigned to a user when they log in. RSS Feeds New to WSS 3.0, every list and library is RSS enabled. This feature allows users with RSS-enabled readers to view changes to lists or libraries without visiting the SharePoint site. Recycle Bin Also new to WSS 3.0, this feature enables users to restore items that were accidentally deleted. Administration of the lifecycle of deleted items is also available. In addition, there is a secondary recycle bin, for administrative recovery of items accidentally deleted from the Recycle Bin itself, for added security. Backup and Restore (with VSS) Backing up and restoring SharePoint is another new feature available in the administrative interface for WSS 3.0, with improved functionality utilizing Windows Server 2003’s Volume Shadow Copy technology. List Indexing Another new addition to WSS 3.0, this feature improves performance and capacity of large lists through the indexing of specific list columns. Content Types Also new to WSS 3.0, Content types are generally list item templates, and can be associated with their own workflows and metadata and used in any list or library. Content types can also specify file types and their templates for document libraries, allowing users to be able to create several different types of files from the New button in one library. Workflows Brand new to WSS 3.0 (thanks to the Windows Workflow Foundation), customizable structured workflows are supported for document libraries and lists. Workflows are a process management feature that triggers actions based on the status of library or list items. Folder Organization Allow items to be organized in folders in documents libraries and lists in WSS 3.0. Folder organization can be used to make huge libraries or lists easier to view and manage or comfort users who are more familiar with file shares. Item Level Security New to WSS 3.0, each item can have its own Access Control List, which offers more granular security. Centralized Configuration Management Using ASP.NET 2.0, SharePoint supports a central administrative site. This site has been almost complete overhauled for WSS 3.0, per user feedback, is more logically organized, and has additional support for delegation and isolation of duties. Site Management Sites can be easily deployed using site templates and definitions. They are easily customized, and they can be saved as templates to be used elsewhere. Also, new to WSS 3.0, site hierarchies can be reorganized, which means that subsites can be moved from under one site and placed under another. WSS 3.0 also offers additional support and security for sites using
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Alternate Access Mapping and Zones This allows SharePoint to respond to alternate addresses and apply the correct authentication requirements depending on the address’s zone. Monitoring This feature provides usage analysis and diagnostic logging to enable administrators to better manage SharePoint resources.
Anxiety, Trepidation, and Licensing Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is considered to be a server component, like Internet Information Services (IIS), and it uses the server’s license model. No additional licensing is required. However there is one possible caveat. There is something called an External Connector license required when external users are going to be authenticating to the domain and using SharePoint. In that case, the external user is using an account that is not a licensed account for that server, or using a machine that is not licensed for server access, depending on the server’s licensing model. Since those users are not covered under the Server’s license, they must be covered elsewhere, thus the External Connector license comes into play. The External Connector license is a per server license for Windows Server 2003. It is purchased per server, not per client. This means, a server with this license can legally allow an unlimited number of external clients to authenticate and access its resources. Keep in mind that a license is required for external users who are authenticating and using the resources on the SharePoint server. Due to the fact that the SharePoint server is an IIS web server, there is no license required for users if they are accessing the server anonymously, such as someone who is only looking and doesn’t need to contribute to the site. The scenario in which the External Connector license (or any other license) is required varies, so definitely contact Microsoft Licensing to see whether or not the External Connector license is a requirement for you.
MOSS 2007 Features In addition to WSS 3.0, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 offers features especially geared toward large business and enterprise customers. MOSS, as its former name SharePoint Portal Server implies, is fundamentally designed to pull together unrelated resources so they can be accessed from one portal location. Focused on business intelligence, processes, and document management; MOSS 2007 offers the following additions to Windows SharePoint Services’ extensive functionality: Portal Site Templates Additional site templates are especially geared toward centralizing user access to other locations and applications: Enterprise, Corporate Internet presence site, Application Portal Site, and a Roll Up portal site. Enhanced CSS support is also available for extensive corporate branding of portal sites. Socialization and Personalization Offers personalized public My Sites for each user. As well as web parts, such as the SharePoint sites and documents roll up web part (which can list colleagues,
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friends, and members of a common distribution group), and a social networking web part (which uses information from colleagues’ my site information to aggregate common interests). Convenient content authoring and publishing for users is also available through the browser. Enhanced Search MOSS offers more robust search capabilities across enterprise content sources (sources beyond a single site collection, such as file shares, websites, other SharePoint servers, public folders, and Lotus Notes databases) and supports 200 different file types, relevance ranking, people search, and extensive search indexing administration and control. Business Document Management With additional workflow features built-in (approvals, feedback, and signature collection), MOSS has enhanced document management sites with document libraries that enforce information rights policies with integrated rights management, auditing and retention policies, and legal document processing, as well as record repositories for archiving inactive documents. Business Processes and Forms The enterprise version of MOSS offers enhanced support for business form use and management. Users can fill out InfoPath forms from the browser. Integrated heavily with InfoPath 2007, MOSS supports design-once development. It has a Form Import Wizard and centralized forms management and control. Business Intelligence MOSS features an integrated business dashboard that assembles and displays information from different sources. The Enterprise version also offers integrated spreadsheet publishing and management, Excel services, data connection library, business data catalogs, business data web part and actions, a Report Center, and Key Performance Indicators. Single Sign-On This feature integrates with Microsoft systems and line of business applications. It requires a separate credentials database. It allows users to log on to a portal site and have their credentials passed to other backend applications. As you can see, MOSS is pretty powerful, but it becomes pretty obvious how much of MOSS’s functionality actually lies in the hands of WSS, and why it’s useful to understand WSS first.
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, More Versions than a Barrel of Vistas (almost) Microsoft went hog wild to get their money’s worth from MOSS. You can get a good deal on MOSS if you are a nonprofit organization or an academic institution. However, acquiring MOSS can still be expensive if you are not careful. To ease the burden of buying a product that may be overpowered for your needs, Microsoft added to the confusion by offering several different kinds of MOSS. (Keep in mind that this information is offered to you to let you know what you would be getting into if you chose to use MOSS in your environment. However, WSS is still free and uses the Server’s licensing model, no extra CALs required.) MOSS has one core product-Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. It can run as a Standard MOSS server or an Enterprise MOSS server, depending on what Client Access Licenses (CAL) you have (sneaky huh?). Interestingly, the CALs drive what features are available to the clients. The Standard CALs don’t give you everything that the Enterprise ones do. And yes, that basically makes sense. That way, a Standard company doesn’t need to pay for Enterprise features it may never use. But
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here’s the catch: in order to use those Enterprise features, you must first buy standard CALs and then purchase Enterprise CALs as well. If you are an Enterprise customer, you can’t just choose to buy the Enterprise CALs to support the Enterprise features. You must have a Standard and an Enterprise CAL for each user to use the Enterprise features. In addition, you can buy separate types of MOSS altogether. MOSS for Search is basically WSS with the enhanced, enterprise-wide search capabilities of MOSS. Adding enhanced search capabilities to WSS will cost you the price of MOSS for Search and the Client licensing fees. MOSS for Internet Sites is meant to be used if your SharePoint server is Internet facing, and it is an add-on to WSS. It is licensed per-server license and, logically, doesn’t use CALs. It is basically the Server 2003 External Connector license for SharePoint. If you are confused, just keep in mind: ◆
To use MOSS you must buy it, of course. But when you buy it, you are really buying the core MOSS server license.
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Once you buy MOSS, you must buy a CAL for each client in your business to access it. Just to use MOSS, you need the Standard CAL for each user. To use the Enterprise features, you must also have Enterprise CALs for each user.
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If MOSS is going to be accessed through the internet by people who are not employees, you must have MOSS for internet sites for each server serving the public.
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The other MOSS family products, such as MOSS for search or Microsoft Office Forms Server, are MOSS installations that are slightly modified or limited in order to use or enhance a particular feature of MOSS. They are for the business that doesn’t need (and may not be willing to pay for) all of the MOSS features. These products still use CALs though, even though they are not the full fledged product.
For quick reference, Microsoft offers the following MOSS core products: ◆
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Server License. This is the core SharePoint server 2007 license. You can’t have MOSS without it.
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Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Client Access License, Standard Edition. There must be at least a Standard CAL for each client in order for them to even use MOSS.
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Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Client Access License, Enterprise Edition. This license is an add-on to the Standard Edition. You must have a standard CAL for each enterprise CAL. This license allows a client to use business intelligence enterprise services such as performance management dashboards and electronic forms.
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Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Internet Sites. This software may be used only for Internet-facing websites. The license is per server, so it doesn’t need separate CALs. Is basically the External Connector server license for MOSS. However, it was not meant to be taken advantage of by internal users.
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Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 for Search. This MOSS is an odd addition to the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server family. It isn’t really a full-blown MOSS server. When you buy it, you are literally adding MOSS search features to a standard WSS install.
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Microsoft Office Forms Server 2007. This addition to the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server family is an add-on to WSS that creates better support for building InfoPath forms and displaying them for client use without the client needing to install InfoPath. It does have some enhanced InfoPath integration to create, edit, or upload forms. You pay for the web browser support for displaying InfoPath forms rather than buying InfoPath for the clients on your network that need it. It may seem like a single-trick pony, but it could save you money if you know it’s there. This functionality can be enabled as part of the Enterprise features of MOSS itself. Forms server simply isolates that capability for customers who don’t want to pay for full-blown MOSS.
A Brief History of SharePoint It’s great to see a solid list or two about what products do, even if you don’t recognize some of the features or can’t see how they relate to you in the beginning. A features list can provide food for thought and a good reference for later. However, when reading a list of what something can do, you might not realize how incredible some of those features are or how this version really kicks the butt of the version before it. To really understand SharePoint, it helps to know its humble beginnings and how it got to its current greatness. Windows SharePoint Services started out as SharePoint Team Services (STS) version 1 and was a feature that could be found only on the FrontPage 2002 CD (or as part of Office XP). It worked on both Windows XP and Windows Server 2000 and was basically a demonstration of how powerful sites and applications using IIS and FrontPage Server Extensions could be. STS set up IIS Web Sites with really useful and nifty lists, with the familiar document library, discussions, events, tasks, contacts, and links. It was pretty basic, but even at that level of usability, it was a hit. Despite it being so new, it was also surprisingly customizable using FrontPage. Of course, people complained about STS. It stored documents in a file share and metadata in the content database, and it used a mix of ISAPI and FrontPage extensions to create pages, aspects on the pages, and web parts. It was a mishmash of bits, but it was a great start. Meanwhile, in a different development track, Microsoft was trying to capitalize on the growing portal market by releasing SharePoint Portal Server 2001 (SPS). According to legend, this product was created independently and ironically only resembled STS’s functionality with added features. The two products were very different under the hood. SPS did not have many of the behind-the-scenes limitations of STS, and it was sort of a precursor to some of the backend functionality later found in the newer version of STS (WSS). SPS was definitely not free. Generally, it required a server license and a CAL for each user. Later, with the introduction of WSS, SPS version 2 was built to depend on WSS, while still costing extra money. This charging structure is still in place today, with a free, foundation SharePoint product, and then the much more expensive add-on Server product. When Windows SharePoint Services came out, it was practically a rebuild of STS, but it did have STS at its foundation. The name change from SharePoint Team Services indicated that the product was not limited to team activities and may have helped encourage people to consider WSS a server product, and as such, affected by the Server’s licensing model. However, to this day, some of the program files still bear the initials STS. WSS put the documents and other data in the same database as the metadata, and mostly used ASP.NET for the pages and components of its various parts. The later versions of WSS don’t work well with those FrontPage extensions on the IIS server. WSS uses its own very customized version of those extensions and will not install (or at least not properly) if the FrontPage extensions are
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enabled in IIS. WSS stepped out as a non-FrontPage–dependent product, being downloadable from the Internet or built-in as a server role in Server 2003 R2. The primary tool used to customize it was still FrontPage, but ironically people actually complained about having to buy FrontPage to edit it properly. Ah, how soon they forget that they used to have to buy the FrontPage CD to even get SharePoint. Service Packs were released for WSS, which meant it was going places. Service Pack 1 was released to provide numerous error fixes and performance and security enhancements. Then due to customer interest and the fact that version 3 was so far on the horizon, Service Pack 2 was released to appease the masses and whet their appetite for the version to come. This Service Pack made some significant changes to SharePoint’s performance; rolling together numerous hotfixes, correcting a number of undocumented (in the knowledgebase) issues, and improving the overall functionality of SharePoint itself. There were still some functionality that could use improvement, such as a lack of security filtering (users could actually access settings pages, but not save the settings), no convenient way to tell what account was logged in, navigating between sites and subsites could be inconvenient, and the Administrative site layout made it difficult to find settings. After Service Pack 2, came the long awaited Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, an upgrade of epic proportions. WSS 3.0 takes advantage of the strength and flexibility of ASP .NET 2.0, and requires the new Windows Workflow Foundation to offer workflow functionality to things such as document collaboration or issue tracking. Adding new and improved features that users have been clamoring for (such as required document check out, improved navigation, security filtering, improved Central Administration layout, wikis, blogs, RSS feeds, and content types), WSS 3.0 is significantly different from its predecessors. In an ironic twist, Microsoft has “repurposed” good old FrontPage as the primary customizing tool of choice when working on SharePoint. It is no longer being sold solely as a web development tool and has been split into two different products, with one half of it being renamed “SharePoint Designer,” and intended for use specifically for customizing SharePoint. It was once the only way you could get STS, and is now specifically marketed to only edit SharePoint. Fitting don’t you think?
What Version Is It? Due to SharePoint’s varied past, there is some confusion concerning what WSS was actually called before version 3.0. Microsoft considers the first WSS to be the second version of SharePoint Team Services, which is why the WSS installer is traditionally named stsv2.exe. But officially Microsoft always refers to whatever version of WSS someone is using as Windows SharePoint Services, even if they admit that the installer is called stsv2.exe and when you install the product, it calls itself Windows SharePoint Services 2.0. So how do you tell the versions apart? Well, Windows SharePoint Services before any service packs, has the version number in Site Settings of 6.0.2.5530. If you were looking for that version online, you would find the installer file (called STSV2.exe) if you did a search for Windows SharePoint Services. When you install Service Pack 1, the version number changes to 6.0.2.6361. Some people may have even called that version Windows SharePoint Services 1.0, which is considered a mistake. According to Microsoft there never was a 1.0 version. As far as they are concerned it’s either referred to as
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Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 or Windows SharePoint Services without a version, period. At least until WSS 3.0. To install this Service Pack 1 version of WSS, you would reasonably enough, search for Windows SharePoint Services with Service Pack 1. And when you found it, the installer would be called stsv2.exe (do you see a pattern here?). When Service Pack 2 is applied to Windows SharePoint Services, the version number becomes 6.0.2.6568. This is also exactly the same version number as the Windows SharePoint Services server role on the Windows Server 2003 R2. This is the version known colloquially as Windows SharePoint Services 2.0. And if you do want to download Windows SharePoint Services 2.0, you have to use the Windows SharePoint Services with Service Pack 2 installer (also called stsv2.exe) instead. To make matters worse, each installation of WSS actually has two different representations of its version numbers. In Site Settings (internal to WSS), each version of Windows SharePoint Services prior to version 3 used a number syntax of 6.0.2.XXXX, with the last four digits actually pertaining to the version. But if you ever went to Add\Remove Programs (which is obviously external to WSS), you would first notice that, no matter if installation is the base Windows SharePoint Services or Windows SharePoint Services with a Service Pack, WSS will always show up as Windows SharePoint Services 2.0. The next thing you’ll notice, if you click on Support Information for the Windows SharePoint Services entry, is that the version number will be displayed as 11.0.XXXX.0, with next to the last set of digits indicating the version number. So that brings us to Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. This version has a completely new installation interface that indicates from the start that it’s Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. The installer is no longer refers to STS at all and is called SharePoint.exe. Further, the product, after installation, is depicted as Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 in Add\Remove Programs. And finally, the version number that is displayed in Site Settings is almost exactly the same as the version number displayed in the Support Information for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, ending the discrepancy between the two. The version number, in case you are wondering, is 12.0.0.4518 in Site Settings, and 12.0.0.4518.1016 in Support Information. So for the record, SharePoint Team Services was version 1.0. Windows SharePoint Services, regardless of Service Pack, was version 2.0. And now, Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 is explicitly referred to by that version number. Now you know.
So that’s where SharePoint comes from and what it’s capable of doing today. This book will cover the ins and outs of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 to give you the best bang for your buck, the most information about what you can get out of the free version before you go out and buy the expensive add-on. Now that you understand what SharePoint can do, let’s get into what SharePoint is made of, what makes it tick, what you need to know before installing it, and what to look out for when trying to make it work.
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Preparing for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
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Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Under the Hood You’ve heard of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. You’ve probably seen webcasts and presentations about it, but what is it and why should it matter to you? Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) 3.0 is a nifty web-based collaboration, data management, communication, idea-creating, problem-solving tool that costs you nothing. Windows SharePoint Services, which is usually referred to in the singular, needs to run on Windows Server 2003 (Service Pack 1 or higher, or Release 2 if you have it) and should be a server role in Server 2008 (which is in beta at the writing of this book). WSS has its needs, its shortcomings, and its weaknesses, but overall, it is a surprisingly useful, flexible, powerful web-based tool for any administrator. The best part is that using it doesn’t require any web-development skills at all. As a matter of fact, this book is being written for IT admins specifically because they seem to be the people who are ultimately responsible for managing SharePoint, without really being trained for it. This book should help fill in some of those holes in training. So what is SharePoint? SharePoint comes in two flavors: WSS 3.0 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS). WSS 3.0 is free and is considered a Windows Server 2003 server role which falls under the server’s license model. However, MOSS, which installs on top of the free version, costs thousands of dollars (depending on volume license) and requires a Client Access License (CAL) for each user. The free version doesn’t require separate client licenses for each user and is the foundation for SharePoint. The paid for version just adds more functionality to the foundation. So yes, Windows SharePoint Services is free and the foundation for the more expensive MOSS components. What does SharePoint do? It presents a web interface for people to collaborate, communicate, and share data in an environment that is consistent, easy for administrators to control, designed to store data and documents, and is very scalable. SharePoint can be installed on a single server or it can be installed on numerous web front end servers sharing the client load on what is called a SharePoint server farm. Fundamentally, SharePoint is a bunch of web pages with web parts and lists on top of a database. However, SharePoint takes advantage of that simple framework and uses it to offer lists, libraries, workspaces, wikis, blogs, and web parts. With these tools, you can offer shared calendars, discussions, file libraries, surveys, and more. For process management, you can require document checkout, content approval, and versioning. You can even establish workflows to trigger alerts and other changes based on where documents or list items are in a process. Lists and libraries can be set up with their own email accounts, so people can email entries without going to the SharePoint site.
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SharePoint Doesn’t Do Share Points? WSS uses content databases to contain its data. It’s a great way to store and organize large numbers of records, documents, photos and more. However, it is not intended to be a web front end for aggregating file shares, despite the fact that file shares are also sometimes called share points. So SharePoint does not have anything to do with share points. There are web parts and other page attributes that can point to file shares, but that is not the primary purpose of SharePoint.
This book will cover the ins and outs of Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 to give you the best bang for your buck and the most information about what you can get from the free version before you buy the expensive versions. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to: ◆
Determine the software and hardware requirements you need for installing SharePoint Services 3.0
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Identify the three ways of installing SharePoint Services 3.0
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Set up the necessary accounts that SharePoint needs to run
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Recognize the new features and requirements of SharePoint
Software Requirements To make all that SharePoint goodness possible, the following roles and technologies must be installed and running on the SharePoint server. These are the underlying technologies that make SharePoint function. Without them, SharePoint won’t even install. Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 (or Higher) SharePoint is web-based because IIS allows a Windows Server (2003 or higher) to host websites and service HTTP requests from clients. Many SharePoint capabilities are dependent upon and colored by the functions and needs of IIS. For example, IIS contains Web Sites, that hold web pages. In SharePoint, IIS’s Web Sites are considered to be Web Applications, formerly called virtual servers in WSS 2, and contain web pages organized into sites and subsites, called site collections. SharePoint Web Applications are considered containers and security boundaries for those site collections, largely because of the built-in properties of IIS’s Web Sites and their management (for example, specifying application pools and whether or not anonymous access is allowed). Those settings may be configured in SharePoint, but are applied at the IIS Web Site (ala web application). This explains why anonymous access is enabled at the web application level and then trickles down to each site collection contained within. The IIS server role must be installed before SharePoint can be installed. An additional SharePoint feature that depends on IIS is incoming email, which requires that the SMTP service is enabled in IIS. ASP.NET 2.0 ASP.NET is required to create and run web parts and other components of SharePoint web pages (as well as compile the pages themselves). It must be installed and enabled in IIS before SharePoint will install properly. ASP.NET 1.1 will also need to be installed for backward compatibility. ASP .NET 2.0 can be installed separately, or as part of the .NET Framework 3.0 installation.
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.NET Framework 3.0 Required in order to install SharePoint, this service contains the Windows Workflow Foundation, a useful part of list management and document processing. Windows Workflow Foundation Although not something that can be installed by itself, this part of the .NET Framework 3.0 is required for SharePoint to work properly.
It’s Not for Workstations SharePoint can’t install just anywhere on just any operating system. It requires Windows Server 2003 SP1 (Standard, Enterprise, Data Center, or Web Edition) or higher. It also requires. NTFS It is not recommended to install, it won’t install on FAT32. It supports x86 and x64, although the installer for either version is still sharepoint.exe, so be careful what you download. SharePoint on a domain controller. Also, Windows Server 2003 Web Edition cannot host a database, but it can hold SharePoint. Therefore you can install SharePoint as a web front end server on the Web Edition of Windows Server 2003, but you cannot install the standalone version.
In addition, somewhere on the network, depending on how you install it, there has to be a version of SQL server for SharePoint to access. There are basically two types of SQL you can use: SQL Server SharePoint supports either SQL 2000 with at least SP3 or SQL 2005. This pricey package is a database powerhouse. Network aware, it can be made to support clustering and more. It is ideal for handling the huge amounts of data a large server farm might generate. SQL Server is possibly overkill for small offices who are considering SharePoint. However, if you already have SQL Server 2000 SP3 or 2005 on your network, then by all means use it. SQL Server 2005 Embedded Edition This edition is also called the Windows Internal Database. If you don’t have SQL handy (and don’t want to shell out the cash to install and use it), you can do the poor man’s single SharePoint server install, as discussed in Chapter 2, “Installation.’’ This will install SQL Server 2005 Embedded Edition (SSEE) during SharePoint’s initial setup. SSEE is a local only (cannot be remotely accessed), free database, which is a modified version of SQL Server 2005 Express and essentially the newer version of WMSDE. With SSEE, SharePoint can create and manage its databases just fine. The catch is that the embedded version of SQL cannot support any other SharePoint servers accessing it. It is not as robust as its big brother SQL 2005, and it has no graphical tools built in with which to manage and update it.
Client-Side Shenanigans Of course, from the client side, users will need a browser to access the SharePoint sites. Microsoft says that SharePoint has two levels of browser support: Level 1 and Level 2. Level 1 browsers support Active X controls, namely Internet Explorer 6.0, 7.0, or higher. Level 2 refers to all other browsers. SharePoint is optimized for Level 1 browsers (no surprise there) and supports everything you might ever want to do in SharePoint. Level 2 browsers support only non–Active X activities and are generally limited to reading and adding text to fields. Your performance may vary, depending on what customization
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and development has been done on your sites. The bottom line is, Microsoft wants you to use IE to use SharePoint—that and Office 2007, of course. Office 2007 is incredibly integrated with SharePoint; half the things you can do with SharePoint you can do better with Office 2007. Office 2003 can do integration too, but not as completely as Office 2007.
It’s important to realize how pivotal SQL is to SharePoint. In addition to hosting nifty-looking websites, SharePoint’s real primary purpose is to store and access data from its databases. SharePoint is really an extensive database front end. It’s all about lists (and a special kind of list called a Library). Lists contain data in records and fields (or, visually, rows and columns). Therefore, SharePoint logically requires databases on the back end to hold all that data. As you know, SharePoint does not necessarily need to be installed on the same server as the databases themselves, although it can be if you need it. That is the beauty of SQL server: it can be accessed remotely. This means that a SharePoint server just needs to be pointed at a nearby SQL server to create and use a database there. This is convenient for several reasons, such as separating resources and storage, helping eliminate the SharePoint server as a single point of failure, and scalability. If a SQL database can be accessed by one SharePoint server, then it stands to reason (with maybe a little tweaking) that other SharePoint servers can access the same database. This is what makes server farms possible. Using this approach, multiple installations of SharePoint can be pointed to the same configuration and content databases, so they can do load balancing and share the same consistent configuration and administration settings. This is obviously why SharePoint requires SQL. This is also where you see a functional split between installing SharePoint to be hosted by a single server and installing SharePoint to be managed across a server farm. Single server installations only need local access to a database, and they can easily use SSEE to accomplish that. A server farm requires a remote SQL server that all SharePoint front end servers can share. So there you have it, that’s SharePoint’s foundation; IIS 6.0 or higher, ASP .NET 2.0, .NET Framework 3.0, and SQL Server 2000 SP3 or higher (or you can let SharePoint install SSEE). These roles and technologies, working in tandem, power SharePoint. The strengths and weaknesses of this underlying infrastructure lend their particular traits to SharePoint. Knowing about them teaches you both how SharePoint works and how to manage it, especially when it comes to troubleshooting. Now that you know SharePoint’s critical components, there are other considerations you need to cover before you install it.
Installing SharePoint: Single Server and Server Farm SharePoint may come in two sizes, but it can actually be installed three different ways: Basic, Stand-alone Server, and Server Farm. The last two options are under the heading “Advanced.’’ Basic The Basic install assumes that you are going to use only one server ever to run SharePoint and that you don’t have a copy of SQL handy to use for its databases. What it does in that case is install SharePoint assuming all necessary services are going to run locally and that you need it to install the free “Windows Internal Database,’’ which is Microsoft’s nickname for its SQL Server 2005 Embedded Edition database (SSEE).
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Desktop Database Primer MSDE was Microsoft’s free desktop database engine, originally for developers to run on their workstations to develop SQL applications without having to have a copy of the expensive version of SQL. It had a 2GB limit, could have a maximum of only five concurrent users, could not be accessed remotely, had no search indexing capabilities, and had a few more limitations. WMSDE, or MSDE (Windows), was created by Microsoft to be the built-in database back end for some of their free but necessary products, such as Microsoft’s Windows Server Update Service (WSUS) and Windows SharePoint Services 2.0. The WMSDE version of MSDE unlocked the 2GB limitation, but it still did not have full-search indexing or remote access capabilities. WMSDE was sort of “embedded” in those free Microsoft products, meaning it was transparent, installed invisibly; and was a critical part of those products, so much so that they installed it automatically (well, WSS 2.0 did if you told it to). This explains why the newest version of WMSDE that installs with the SharePoint version 3.0 Basic install is called SQL Server 2005 Embedded Edition (SSEE) or Windows Internal Database (WID). It is a slightly modified version of the WMSDE update, called SQL Server 2005 Express Edition, which has been surprisingly improved and supports search, remote access, and Windows authentication. If you perform the SharePoint Basic installation, the SSEE database cannot be used by any other SharePoint server on the network. You will not have remote access. There is absolutely no way that you can do a more complicated, multiple server installation of SharePoint using the SSEE database. Unfortunately, an SSEE database is not quite as robust as SQL server databases. For most people, this only means that as the databases fill up more quickly and become more awkward and slower, so it is important to closely monitor the content database of a Basic installed SharePoint server (use database site quotas and quota templates for site collections judiciously). That being said, a lot of small to medium businesses use the Basic install of SharePoint without any problems, and they have the bonus of saving so much money by not buying SQL. Basically, if you plan to never have more than 10 separate web applications in your company, and plan to have only one SharePoint server, then using SSEE would be fine for you. Web applications (and their databases) will be discussed in greater detail in Chapter 8.
Advanced Stand-alone. This installation is essentially the same as the Basic install. Use this installation method if you intend to install SharePoint on one server only, and you want SharePoint to install and use the SSEE database. The only difference between this install type and Basic is that it gives you the option to specify the location of your index files, as well as define your feedback (because you may want to let Microsoft know about your day to day SharePoint experience). Web Front End (Server Farm). This installation method actually includes a few kinds of SharePoint topologies. At its simplest, this is the method of installation you use if you don’t want SharePoint to install SSEE because you have, and are going to use a SQL Server. That’s because Basic and Stand-Alone install SSEE without your involvement. If you have a SQL server on your Windows network (2000 SP3 or 2005) and you want to use it to house your SharePoint databases, then the Server Farm install is the only type that lets you specify where your databases will go.
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The other reason you would use the Server Farm installation method would be if you want a server farm topology. A SharePoint server farm uses more than one server to support SharePoint. This can be simply one SharePoint server and one SQL server; or it can be scale up to a more complex topology, such as several SharePoint severs (generally called web front end servers) and an SQL database cluster. The simplest server farm consists of a database server and a server with SharePoint installed on it, so the two functions are separated between two servers. Together they are a server farm. Of course, there is more to it than that. Usually, people create bigger server farms which means more SharePoint servers all using the same SQL databases. This is appropriate if they have a lot of SharePoint sites and they want to spread HTTP requests between servers to improve performance; meaning multiple SharePoint servers, and even multiple, clustered database servers. If you choose to do a Server Farm installation, you can specify whether the SharePoint server you are installing is the first on the farm or if you want that server to be part of an existing server farm (see Figure 1.1). The first SharePoint server on a server farm is kind of like the first domain controller in a domain. Because it’s the first, it tends to hold all the services and is the one used to set up the databases. Choosing to add the server to an existing server farm means that the installation will install only the files needed to make that new server a web front end server to help support the first server with client requests.
Figure 1.1 Starting a new server farm, or connecting to an existing farm
Server farms work in this configuration because the databases that hold all the information of the SharePoint sites already exist on the SQL server. All you have to do at that point is specify which configuration databases the new server will share with the first server, and presto change-o, you’ve got a new SharePoint server with the same configuration and content.
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The Gorilla in the Room Something that isn’t mentioned much is that server farms, in addition to having front-end servers that all access the same databases, are usually configured using Windows Network Load Balancing software, DNS round robin, or a hardware load-balancing device. Real, server farm, load-balancing functionality requires additional setup using something other than SharePoint. Installing additional SharePoint front-end servers is only one part of it. To make matters worse, there is little current documentation about how to do load balancing. So check out Chapter 15 for a brief demonstration of how to simply do network load balancing with SharePoint. The differences between the kinds of SharePoint installations are not the stuff of rocket science. However, if you intend to do more than run everything on one server, or if you don’t want to end up with the SSEE database, you really need to understand those differences before you install SharePoint.
SharePoint Sites and Databases SharePoint needs at least two different IIS Web Sites (otherwise known as SharePoint web applications) to function. These web applications contain the web pages that you will access to either administer SharePoint or actually use SharePoint’s lists, sites, and libraries. The Central Administration Web Application This web application controls the configuration and administration of all servers on the server farm, as well as all web applications. This site is set up on a completely different and unique port than the standard one for HTTP. If you do a server farm installation, you can specify the port or use the one suggested. If you do a Basic or Stand-Alone installation, then the port will be chosen at random for you during installation and configuration. The range is somewhere between 1023 and 32767. The unique port helps obscure this site from anyone surfing the standard ports on the server. The SharePoint Site The default name for the first SharePoint web application (that isn’t dedicated to Central Administration) is usually SharePoint-80. It will contain the first top-level site for SharePoint, just to get you started (or in a server farm installation, you will have to create if yourself). Web applications were meant to contain site collections, which are literally collections of sites, starting with a top-level site, but can also include additional subsites. Web applications can contain as few as one site collection with one top-level site, or many site collections, each with multiple subsites. Because a web application is essentially a container for your SharePoint sites, when you configure settings at the web application level, they can affect all sites contained therein.
I Thought There Would Be Only Two Keep in mind that these are the web applications that are created during SharePoint installation. You can create more if you’d like. If you inherit a SharePoint server and find that more than two web applications are being used by SharePoint, that’s fine. Someone probably added more for a good reason (see Chapter 8 for more information as to how and why to create additional web applications), and now you are responsible for them. Congratulations.
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Each SharePoint web application needs at least one content database to contain its data. The Central Administration web application also accesses the server farm’s configuration database (which stands to reason, because that is where all the configuration settings are for SharePoint). Because SharePoint is capable of performing full-text, site-collection wide searches, Search also has its own database. The Sharepoint Databases This means that four databases must be created when SharePoint is installed. I am using the default names, but you can change them depending on how you install SharePoint. SharePoint Config (GUID): This is the configuration database for SharePoint. It holds all of the configuration data and settings for the entire server farm. The thing that makes separate SharePoint servers all members of the same server farm is that each of them use the same configuration database. This makes it possible for all of those servers to have the same configuration settings. When you do a single server installation, the database will be called SharePoint Config (GUID). If you do a server farm installation, the suggested default (which you can easily change) is simply SharePoint Config. WSS Search Servername This is the database that contains all of the search data acquired when the index (or content access) service crawled through the SharePoint site collection. Search is an interesting beast in SharePoint, both overly simple and potentially complex. WSS Content This is the content database for the first web application made in SharePoint for SharePoint sites. It will contain information about the site collections that the web application contains, and it will contain all of the list, library, and web part metadata, documents, and attachments. Keep in mind that you can have more than one content database for a web application, and chances are good that you will grow out of the first one pretty quickly. SharePoint AdminContent (GUID): This is the content database for the Central Administration web application. Because the Central Administration website is just like any other SharePoint website, it is prone to the same strengths and weaknesses. Site settings can be changed, including those for the master page. Novices should not do this. As a matter of fact, no one should. They could potentially delete the document library folder containing the Help files and more.
Content Databases Although each web application gets its own content database, web applications can contain more than one site collection, and each site collection can contain multiple sites that can contain lists and libraries that can get really big (I’m not guaranteeing anything, I’m just saying, over and over, that they can). Frankly, using a single database to contain large sites full of data can be an invitation for that database to become really slow and unwieldy. There is always a reasonable limit to how much any one database can hold, and its surprising how quickly that limit can be reached. Don’t think of it as a bad thing; it just means that people are using the sites. To help you cope, SharePoint allows you to add extra content databases to web applications to keep up with the ever-increasing data load. This is why it is possible to have several content databases for one web application. In addition, you can configure database capacity settings (by limiting the number of site collections per database and the size in MB of the site collections themselves), so that you can be warned when a database is getting too big and be prepared to add a new database. Overall, this means that SharePoint uses IIS Web Sites as web applications to hold site collections. Web applications can contain multiple site collections, each site collection can hold
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many sites, and each site can have many lists and libraries. As a result, a SharePoint server farm can have many web applications, each with several content databases. However, there can only be one configuration database for each server farm. The configuration database specifies the configuration for the whole farm and, therefore, must be only one.
SharePoint Service Accounts and Services After it installs, SharePoint creates and enables certain services and application pools. To be able to do their jobs, these services need to run with some sort of account context. Depending on how you install SharePoint, you may have to create domain accounts to apply to those services. If you want SharePoint to work, it will help to know what the services are, what they do, and what access those accounts need while remaining secure.
Service Accounts Here are the accounts you need for SharePoint to install and work: Setup Account (Basic or Stand-alone install) In order to install SharePoint, you must be logged in on the server with an administrative account. If your server is not in a domain, this account needs to be the local Administrator. In order to install SharePoint, you must be logged in on the server with an administrative account. On a domain, the account can be a domain admin. The account must be able to install software locally, and should also be allowed to add and start services on the server. All other service accounts used by SharePoint are set up automatically (local system or network service) with a Stand-alone or Basic installation. It really is the easiest installation, in addition to being the cheapest. Although it is not super scalable, it is convenient.
The Cheese Stands Alone You don’t have to install SharePoint to support multiple servers in a domain environment. You also can install SharePoint on a stand-alone server in a workgroup with no domain controller. The easiest way to do this is to install SQL server (or let SharePoint install the SQL 2005 Embedded Edition for you) on the serverthatwillhouseSharePoint.Thenitcandoallthedatabasemanagementitrequireswithoutneeding to access anything on a different server. To use incoming email features, the server will also need to have SMTP enabled. Local users and groups will be used to give users access to SharePoint in that scenario, rather than going through a domain controller. It just goes to show that SharePoint is scalable down as well as up. Another bonus of a single-server install with SQL 2005 Embedded Edition is that you don’t really need to worry about specifying domain permissions or specific SQL permissions of the SharePoint service accounts. If you choose a Basic install, database and services set up will be done for you by SharePoint using the administrative account you used to log in. It will specify that all services will run using local system or network service server accounts.
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Setup Account (Server Farm) In a domain Server Farm install, the setup account should be a domain admin (you can use local Administrator accounts to install SharePoint on each individual server, but it is easier simply to use one setup account that is a domain admin). This account should be allowed to install SharePoint on any server in the domain, and it must be able to access the SQL server that SharePoint will be using to build databases. On the SQL server, the setup account must have these SQL server security roles on the target SQL server: Logins, Securityadmin, and Dbcreator. Database Access Account Also known as the server farm account or configuration database account, this account is powerful and critical to SharePoint. It does not need to have administrative privileges; but it should be a domain account. All other rights for this account will be configured automatically by the setup account during installation. The setup account adds the database access account to the SQL server’s Logins, Dbcreator, Securityadmin roles. This is why the database access account ends up being the owner (DBO) of most of the SharePoint databases.
The DBO exception Oddly enough the database access account does not become the DBO of the configuration database for the server farm because the setup account creates that database during installation and then assigns ownership of it to the database access account. This means that, by default, the setup account is the DBO, but the database access account holds an owner role.
This account is the Central Administration application pool identity. This means that it is the account that accesses and changes the configuration database for the server farm. It is also the account used to power the SharePoint Timer Service, which is in charge of any jobs that need to be started and stopped at different times (such as getting incoming mail, managing quotas, and alerts). This account should be guarded and not used for anything else. Content Database Account Also known as the web application account, or web application application pool account, this is the account that uses the content database of a web application. There should be one of these per web application—although under some circumstances (as is the case in businesses with security policies that limit service accounts), web applications can share an account. This account should be a domain user and otherwise is given (and requires) database ownership of all content databases associated with a web application. Search Account This account should be a domain user. It directly accesses the Search database. Because it takes the questions entered into the Search field in SharePoint and queries the Search database records with them, it is considered the query account. Content Access Account Also known as the index, gatherer, or crawler account, this account analyzes all of the content in SharePoint site collections. It must be a domain user, and it will automatically be given full read rights to all web applications. It also has access to the Search database to write in the information it has gathered. Optional SharePoint Admin Account I also suggest you consider a general purpose SharePoint administrator account. This account should be a domain admin (or at least local admin
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for each SharePoint server), so it can install tools locally on all SharePoint servers on the farm, run the SharePoint command line tools, and can be used as a default administrator for central administration and new site collections you may create. It comes in handy for me when I need to troubleshoot a site or a setting in Central administration. I always know that account’s name and password, and it is usually the first owner of most site collections I create (of course, this may not be allowed to remain after handing the collection over to its rightful owner, but it’s convenient during setup).
If the SQL DBA Doesn’t Play Nice If the person in charge of the SQL databases is not comfortable giving the SharePoint server admin the power to create databases on their SQL server, don’t worry. If you prebuild the databases that the SharePoint server will require, SharePoint will happily connect at the correct points of setup to the preexisting database without unduly empowering non-database administrators to create databases of their own. Check out the “Deploy using DBA-created databases” TechNet article for more information about how to configure the databases and handle service accounts in that situation. There are versions of the document for both WSS and for MOSS, but they are basically identical. Go to the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 Technical Library, Deployment for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 technology, End to end deployment scenarios, “Deploy using DBA-created databases.”
SharePoint Services The following services are created and required by SharePoint. It might be handy to know what they are before you conduct your first installation. SPAdmin (Windows SharePoint Services Administration) This is the administrative service for SharePoint. It runs on every SharePoint server locally and is in charge of checking the configuration database for changes. It keeps track of what server on a server farm is running what service, and is used by sharepoint to access local resources per server. This services runs as the WSSADMIN process in Task Manager. SPTimerV3 (Windows SharePoint Services Timer) This is the service in charge of actually triggering and running jobs for SharePoint. Because it uses the database access account identity, it usually doesn’t have administrative permissions on the local server; however, it does have ownership permissions to do what it needs to do on both the configuration and content databases. If it needs to do something administrative on the local machine, it calls on the SPAdmin account to do it. This service runs as the OWSTIMER process in Task Manager. SPSearch (Windows SharePoint Services Search) This is the Search service for SharePoint. It runs on the SharePoint servers that are running the Search service. This service runs the mssearch process in Task Manager. SPTrace (Windows SharePoint Services Tracing) This service also installs on each SharePoint server locally. It is used for error tracking and analysis, and controls the trace logs. This service runs as the wsstracing process in Task Manager.
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SPWriter (Windows SharePoint Services VSS Writer) This service integrates with SQL’s VSS writer service, inherited from SPS 2003, and works with SharePoint’s backup and recovery capabilities. It makes it possible to use Windows Volume Shadow Copy when doing backups. This services runs as the SPWRITER process in Task Manager, and only starts when necessary. So it’s not always running.
SQL Services SharePoint is dependent upon SQL, so it should go without saying that if it is installed to use the SSEE database locally, that version of SQL should be running locally as well.
User Account Modes Most people don’t even realize they have a choice when it comes to selecting a user account mode. By default, SharePoint will install using the Active Directory Domain Account mode. However, hidden deep behind an Advanced Settings button at the end of SharePoint’s installation is the option to choose a different option when it comes to how SharePoint handles user accounts. When they say “advanced,’’ they mean it. Setting up account modes is a one-shot deal. You get one chance to choose your user account mode when you install the first SharePoint server in the server farm (or a Stand-alone server). Then that information gets locked in the configuration database of the whole farm, affecting the whole farm with no way to change it. You cannot undo the account mode decision once you make it. So choose with caution. There are two choices and they both are based on Windows Active Directory user accounts. There are two User Account Mode options. The default user account mode is the one with which we are all familiar—Active Directory Domain Account Mode. The other account mode (Active Directory Account Creation Mode) is more complicated to set up and is actually considered a different SharePoint deployment. That other user account mode is the one that must be selected during installation in order to be enabled—otherwise the default, Domain Account mode will be enforced. Domain Account Mode This mode is selected by default during SharePoint setup, SharePoint lets the administrators add users to SharePoint based on their Active Directory or Local Users accounts. In other words, first you have user accounts in Active Directory (which is what you probably have already), and then you can add them to SharePoint. Active Directory Account Creation (ADAC) Mode When this mode is selected during SharePoint setup, SharePoint allows administrators to create user accounts in Active Directory when they add them to SharePoint. That’s right. When you add users to SharePoint, it adds the users to a special Organizational Unit (OU) in Active Directory. This was meant for ISPs or companies that had a lot of external partners or offsite users who needed authenticated access to the server content. Therefore, instead of creating user accounts in Active Directory and then adding them to SharePoint, Active Directory Account Creation mode does it the other way around by adding the user to SharePoint, which adds them automatically to Active Directory. See Chapter 15 for more information as to how to use ADAC and what happens when you do. Sounds interesting, doesn’t it? But keep in mind that it is a potentially complicated procedure from which there is no going back. See Chapter 15 for a step by step look at Active Directory Account Creation mode.
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Authentication Types In conjunction with IIS, SharePoint supports several different ways to allow users to authenticate. They are not exclusive; you can choose to apply multiple types of authentication to a web application. IIS will apply the most restrictive method first. If that fails, it will try the second most-restrictive method, and so on until it finally refuses the client or lets them log in.
A Rose by Any Other Name . . . You may have noticed that SharePoint uses the same terminology in several different ways in several different places. Here is a quick rundown on some of them: Authentication Provider: (sometimes referred to as Membership Providers): Usually refer to the services that provide authentication like SQL Forms based authentication or Windows authentication. Authentication Method: The method that authentication is sent to the Windows Authentication Provider, such as NTLM or Kerberos. In IIS, authentication methods also refer to using other authentication types like basic, digest, and integrated Windows to authenticate users to a particular Web Site. Authentication Source: Where the authentication accounts are stored and accessed by the Provider. Examples of this are Active Directory or the database used by Forms based authentication. Because SharePoint has gone through several different versions by this time, and over time it has changed its terminology. However, the SharePoint command line tool, STSADM, does occasionally reflect some of the older terms. So don’t be surprised if you see, when working at the command line, the following examples: ◆
Sites collections are called “Sites.”
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Sites are often called “Webs.”
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Subsites are referred to as “Subwebs.”
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Server Farms are often referred to as Web Farms.
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Web Applications are called “Virtual Servers.”
Windows Integrated Authentication This authentication method requires the user to have a domain account or a local account on the SharePoint server. This, of course, is the method that Microsoft prefers and the one used throughout this book. Digest This also works with Active Directory, but it sends the username and password as hashed values. It can be used if Windows Integrated Authentication is blocked by a firewall or not being passed by a proxy server. It is also available on WebDAV servers. Basic This method will send authentication information across a network as cleartext, which is obviously not a great idea. Anonymous Access This method allows users to establish an anonymous connection with IIS by using an anonymous or guest account.
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Authentication Methods In addition to those authentication types, SharePoint offers two Windows authentication methods during installation. These protocols don’t just govern how authentication data is passed on the network for users trying to access SharePoint; they govern how SharePoint service accounts themselves access resources: NTLM This secure protocol encrypts usernames and passwords over the network. It simply sends data to the authenticating authority and back. This protocol does not require additional configuration, and it is suggested for most SharePoint scenarios. Kerberos This secure protocol encrypts data but handles authentication differently than NTLM. Kerberos is based on ticketing. A username and password are passed to an authentication server, which sends back a ticket to allow the authenticated user to access network resources. The user and the authentication server (or Key Distribution Center) must trust each other. This means that service principal names must be set for the SharePoint servers and the database access account so resources on the network can be accessed by SharePoint on behalf of the user. The account and the servers must be trusted for delegation in some circumstances. Microsoft suggests using NTLM, because using Kerberos requires the database access account to have a service principal name, which could be a greater danger to the network if that account is compromised. And even though outside the network, authentication is tighter with the mutual authentication process of Kerberos, using to authenticate can be a problem due to time synchronization. There is one catch though: in some situations, search’s index service cannot authenticate using Kerberos and therefore cannot index sites that require it. For more information about Kerberos and how to configure it, see Chapter 15, “Advanced Installation and Configuration,’’ for more details.
IFilters Don’t despair if you are thinking about collaborating on files other than those made in Microsoft Office using SharePoint. Some vendors use Index Filters (IFilters) so that Search can index their document types. Check with your vendor first to see if they have an IFilter you can use to recognize their file types for searching.
SharePoint Search The Search feature is new to Windows SharePoint Services. In the old days, you could enable Search in SharePoint (WSS 2 and lower) only if you were using a full-blown SQL server. This was because SharePoint was simply using SQL’s built-in full-text search and indexing features to do searches, which could add a significant performance load to the SQL server. This meant that if you did the Typical install of SharePoint, which is now called Basic, and used WMSDE for the database, the Search field simply would not be available in SharePoint (see Figure 1.2). WMSDE does not have the search capabilities of SQL server.
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Figure 1.2 In WSS 2.0, a Typical install could not search
WSS 3.0 uses the same SharePoint search service that the older version of MOSS used. This means that you can perform full-text searches of site collections, including Office files, even if you did a Basic install of SharePoint and are using the SSEE database (see Figure 1.3). SharePoint is doing the searching now, not SQL. This helps lower the performance stress of the SQL server as well.
Figure 1.3 In WSS 3.0, a Basic Installation has a search field
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Search basically does two things: ◆
It responds to search queries.
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It crawls through site collections and indexes data.
This is why Search has two services, the search service and the index service (or content access service), and their corresponding service accounts. Both services use a Search database; the index service merges its collected data with it, and the search service queries it. Only one index service can exist on a server farm, but there can be more than one server running the search service on a farm. (Each server would share the index service.) The index service requires read access to all content databases of all the web applications that will be searched. When a web application is being created, you can assign a search server to service its content database. This is useful if you have more than one server running search. The index service will scan the content databases of the web applications per the schedule you set up when you enable Search. The changes that it finds, are temporarily stored in index files on the SharePoint server that is running the index service, then merges them with the Search database after a set period of time. Meanwhile, the search service, when responding to a user query, will check the index files and the database to be sure that all results are accurate. This is why there can be only one server running the index service on a farm, because those files have to be in one place. Search has some strengths and weakness that you should know about before you install SharePoint: ◆
Search only returns search queries per site collection. That means if you are looking for a document and you have several site collections, you need to know what site collection it’s in or search each site collection until you find it. Site collections are a hard-search boundary.
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Search doesn’t have much of an administrative surface. The GUI settings are limited to what service accounts use, the Search database name, and how often the site collections will be indexed. Indexing is primarily incremental, but even that can strain resources if you do it too often. What little management you can do with search is through the SharePoint command line tool STSADM. See Chapter 13, “STSADM: A Look at the SharePoint Command Line Tool’’ for more details.
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Search can search only site collections (or more precisely content databases). It cannot search file shares, email servers, or other locations. If you want to search content outside site collections, consider shelling out the money for either MOSS or MOSS for Search (which for the added cost, can search multiple site collection or even multiple SharePoint servers). Search uses a top-down approach. When you conduct a search query on a site, it will search that site and all subsites under it. If you conduct a search query on a site at the top of a site collection (the first site created in a site collection), it will search the data contained in its Search database and index files for that site and then systematically check all other subsites below it. However, if you are already on a subsite and start to search, it will search from there and work its way down the subsites below it, ignoring the sites above it in the collection. In other words, Search always searches down and never up. Unless you absolutely know which subsite has the data you are looking for, you should always perform searches from the top level of a site collection.
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Search does whole word, exact match queries. If there are multiple words in a query, AND is implied between the words (orange juice is considered orange AND juice, and would return only results that contain both values). Punctuation is ignored, as is the word “and itself.’’
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However, strangely, the word OR is neither ignored nor recognized as a part of the query logic and is treated like part of the query text itself. ◆
Unfortunately, Search doesn’t accept wildcards or Boolean logic, but it does allow for keyword exclusions or additions by using the plus (+) or minus (–) signs. Search will also support property filtering. Property filtering means that search can recognize some field names and properties, such as filetype, contenttype (used for libraries particularly), author, title, or subject. To filter in the search field by property, the syntax is property:query, such as filetype:txt will result in all text files in the site collection.
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Searches can be scoped. This is a simple concept that just means that when you are in a list, library, or folder, the little dropdown list next to the Search field offers you the option to search that one location or the entire site.
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The search results are displayed on a page organized by modified date or relevance (the default is relevance). This can further allow you to narrow down the search query. Results are displayed with the link to it, and some summarizing information. The page even displays the length of time the query took to complete (Figure 1.4).
Figure 1.4 Search results page
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In a server farm, there should be only one search service account and one index (content access) service account. However, if you have a large and busy server farm, it might be good to have a server dedicated to searching, or you could run more than one server with the search service enabled. Search prefers Windows Authentication and may cause errors in an anonymous environment. In addition, the index service prefers NTLM authentication, so it can have problems accessing a web application that requires Kerberos.
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Sites and lists can be excluded from indexing, if you’d like them to be unsearchable such as lists with item level security, which may cause some items to be displayed for those who can’t open them.
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Search can perform security trimming, which means it includes security information when it is indexing site collections and excludes items from a query based on the permissions of the person asking.
Indexing and Gathering The search service’s index service appear to be hand-me-downs from SPS 2003 and MOSS. This is why WSS 3.0’s Search is independent from SQL. The index service is a powerful feature that you don’t need to monitor. It takes care of itself and does its own thing with WSS. (MOSS has added configuration features for indexing.) Its only content sources are the content databases that SharePoint uses. It uses IFilters and protocol handlers to parse documents, filter out formatting, and find words in documents. It can distinguish between relevant words and irrelevant words or “noise.” It can handle only 64MB of indexed words. If it maxes out, it doesn’t really notify you; it just doesn’t index any more of the document, which is another reason to keep uploads and document files from becoming bloated. It allows whole word searches and keyword inclusion/exclusion, but it doesn’t support stemming, wildcards, or Boolean logic. The IFilters that come with SharePoint can handle Office 2007 file types, text files, HTML, and TIFF files (which is the file type usually used for scanning faxes and documents).
SharePoint and Email Sharepoint integrates with email more than ever. This is why you should consider how you’ll configure email when you’re planning to install SharePoint. In addition to being capable of sending alerts and notifications (which requires properly configured outgoing email), SharePoint needs to be set up to receive incoming email. This is because several lists and libraries can be enabled to receive email. The primary benefit is that you can send a new item to the list without going to the SharePoint site if you know that list’s email address. And you can do of this from the comfort of your email program. No need to open a browser. To manage incoming email, the SharePoint server needs to have the SMTP service set up locally. You should have that enabled before you install SharePoint. When SharePoint receives email, it pulls it from the default drop directory that SMTP uses or from the directory you specify. It gives it to the correct list or library, which parses the email for the subject line, message body, and other pertinent header information. It then applies the information to the appropriate fields in the list record. Incoming email has another interesting new feature called SharePoint Directory Management Service. This service integrates SharePoint with Active Directory. To use it, you need to create a unique OU, give the server farm account extensive access to it, and assign the content database accounts local administrative rights to the SharePoints server. SharePoint can allow users to create distribution lists that show up in the OU and add the list and library incoming email aliases to the Exchange global address list (GAL). Of course, this obviously requires Exchange, and more specifically Exchange 2003 because it integrates so deeply with Active Directory.
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Don’t Let Them Scare You Despite occasional documents stating otherwise, SharePoint Directory Management Service does not have to be running for SharePoint to be able to do incoming email. In its simple straightforward way, incoming email works fine without it. If you don’t want to increase the complexity of your SharePoint install, don’t use SharePoint Directory Management Service. It is an option, not a requirement. Its biggest strength is that it allows Exchange users to have the SharePoint lists’ addresses show up in the global address book. It simply adds contact records and distribution lists to the specified OU in Active Directory. For more about Directory Management Service, see Chapter 15.
Alternate Access Mapping When you initially install and start using SharePoint, accessing it by using the NetBIOS name of the server works fine, but what if you want to be able to access it from the internet? You can’t resolve that server name among all the other machine names on the internet, so you need it to resolve to a DNS name. Alternate Access Mapping is about mapping a SharePoint web application to an alternate name other than the default. That means that you can have an internal, default name of http://sp2 and a different, internet URL of http://sharepoint.dem0tek.com, and both actually point to the same server. Alternate Access Mapping (AAM), specifies alternate access of a web application by internal URLs, public URLs, and zones. An Internal URL is what the web application responds to. A Public URL is what the web application returns to the user in the address bar, and in the links for all search results. Web applications can have five public URLs associated with it (at which point they are called zones). So you can have a Default zone (that’s the default URL for the web application which is usually the root path for all the site collections it might contain), an Intranet zone, Internet zone, Extranet zone, and a Custom zone. There is also another use for AAM, extending web applications. Sometimes you might want to have two web applications using the same content database (and therefore accessing the same websites, lists, etc.). This can give users two ways to access the same data and is useful if you want to have two different types of authentication for the content, depending on what URL the user uses. Because the extended web application is just sharing the same content database as an existing web application, it is considered just another URL used to access the first web application’s content. This is why an extended web application is not given its own name but is considered a zone of the existing web application. In that case one of the Public URL zones is taken up with the URL of the extended web application. So when planning your URL structure and how users are going to access SharePoint, keep AAM in mind.
Managed Paths When planning for SharePoint it’s a good idea to keep in mind how you would like to structure your site collections. Site collections are composed of a top-level site and all the sites that stem from it (called subsites). The top-level site is usually accessed by using the web application’s URL and then the path to the top-level site’s home page. When creating a site collection, you must decide what its URL path will be. When you create your first site collection in a web application, you can give it the root address for that web application, or you can specify a path. What this
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means is if you create the first web application on server SP2, then its URL can be http://SP2, using port 80, which is the root address for the URL. But if you create a second site collection in that web application, it needs to have a different path, because it can’t use the same URL. This is where Managed Paths comes in. By default SharePoint has a “sites’’ managed path for additional site collections. The URL for that path would be, on the same server, http://sp2/sites/. What this means is if you create that additional site collection, it can be something on that path, such as http://sp2/sites/something. You can, of course, create your own, depending on your required topology. This is useful if you are planning to have one web application, say, per region, and then site collections for each office. Then you might consider creating a managed path for the London office, Beijing office, Helsinki, etc. Site collections are useful for being a user account or permissions boundary because you can add users once to the top-level site, apply their permissions, and they are available as users in all subsites as well; but for that site collection only. The other site collections are unaffected by the comings and goings of users in any other site collection. Another thing to consider with managed paths is that if you have additional non-SharePoint Web Sites or web software you want to run in the same IIS Web Site virtual directory, SharePoint automatically ignores it if it is on a path not specified in Managed Paths.
User Accounts and Permissions In order for anyone to use SharePoint, there must be users. SharePoint leans toward organizing users and permissions based on the users’ roles. So if you have a site owner, he would need to have full control of the site, but a member would only need to be able to be a contributor. SharePoint controls the user permissions that can be applied at the web application level. So if necessary, you could actually block certain permissions entirely from ever being applied to users in the site collections the web application contained. At the site and site collection level, permissions can be combined to create permission levels, which are then applied to users or groups. Individual Active Directory Users can be added to SharePoint, but you can also simply add domain security groups as well. Doing so let’s you add a number of users to SharePoint that might require the same permission levels, at one time. It is also easier for SharePoint to handle because has limitations on how many separate security principals it can manage at one time. It’s actually considered SharePoint best practice to use AD security groups to add users rather than individual domain users for that reason. SharePoint uses SharePoint Groups to organize users. There are three SharePoint groups built in: Members, Visitors, and Owners; but you can also make your own. When you create a SharePoint group, you assign permission levels to the group. Then, when you add a user, you choose the SharePoint group they should belong to, and that group’s permission levels automatically apply to that user. So when planning your user management strategy keep permissions, permission levels, and SharePoint groups in mind.
Hardware Requirements Trying to pin down the exact hardware requirements for a product like SharePoint is tough. There are many different ways to use it; therefore, there are many ways to configure the resources. Microsoft has some suggestions for SharePoint server’s recommended and minimum requirements. These recommendations are for average server loads. In my experience, the recommendations work pretty well as long as your network is healthy and well configured.
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Processor RAM
2.5GHz minimum, dual processors, 3GHz recommended.
1GB minimum, 2GB or more recommended.
Disk 3GB, NTFS. More disk space is recommended, depending on your storage needs. The 3GB reflects only what SharePoint needs and does not include the needs of the operating system, any SQL databases (if you are going to do a single server install), or anything else running on the server.
All in One Disk space is a particular issue if you are running SQL and SharePoint on the same server, as they would be in a Stand-alone installation. You will need to plan for the storage space of the SharePoint pages in IIS, SMTP mail storage (if you enable incoming email), the indexing files used for search, all the storage space that your site’s lists and libraries will use, and all the other databases SharePoint uses. As you can see, the space that SharePoint might need for its files is not the only space you’ll need. In this case, everything is stored in one place. Size it well and guard it carefully.
DVD Drive
Not really required for SharePoint, but useful.
Display 1024 × 768 on the client (800 × 600 is too small. It forces some pages to require way too much scrolling.) Network
56 kilobits per second (Microsoft’s minimum), 1 gigabit per second is suggested.
These recommendations are just starting points; however, they are more than adequate for most simple SharePoint Server Farm installations. Most single server or simple Server Farm installations can probably handle 1,000 people creating an average load on the SharePoint server, without seeing a lag in operations per second. Commonly, each gigahertz of processing power in a SharePoint server can handle about nine operations per second.
Performance Planning You might be wondering how you determine operations per second? There are formulas to help you figure that out. Essentially, you need to know:
1. How many people are supposed to use SharePoint? (Users) 2. What percentage are really going to use it? (Percent active users) 3. How many operations per day they do on average (how many documents edited, list entries added, searches done, etc)? (Operations)
4. How many hours do the users work in SharePoint on average? (Work Hours) 5. Whether an average work day has particular peaks in performance? (Peak Factor) To calculate the operations per second, multiply items 1, 2, 3, and 5 together, then divide that number by the number of hours those people are going to be working a day by 360,000 (which is 100 percent conversion × 60 minutes per hour × 60 seconds per minute). Altogether that will show you how many operations per second your server needs to efficiently handle.
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To show you what I mean and illustrate that the above hardware requirements are probably adequate for your needs, assume your office has 1,000 people who are going to use SharePoint and 60 percent of them will be actively using SharePoint daily. You estimate that each user probably performs about 50 operations a day. (Most of them will spend more time editing a document than retrieving it from the document library or uploading it.) Let’s say your office has, at maximum, 9 hours of work time a day and a peak factor of 4. Peak factor is a scale between 1 and 5 that refers to how often or how likely there are to be peaks in normal daily usage. One indicates that there is practically no particular time of peak usage during a business day, and 5 indicates that practically the entire day is a peak use time. I never go less than 4, just in case.
Membership in Club SharePoint Is Not All-Inclusive Many businesses do not need to allow every employee access to SharePoint. Therefore, when you determine who will use the SharePoint sites, don’t just include everyone in the company. To help ensure that your calculations are as accurate as possible, consider exactly who will do what. Let’s summarize the data we have: Users: 1,000 Percent active usage: 60 Operations: 50 (per person, per day) Work hours: 9 Peak factor: 4 And the formula that uses that information is: Users × Usage × Operations × Peak ÷ (360,000 × WorkHours), or in our case, 1,000 × 60 × 50 × 4 ÷ (360,000 × 9) That will bring you to the operations per second that your server needs to deliver for your users. In this case, that number is 3.7 operations per second (OPS). Given the standard formula above, 2.5GHz and 1GB of RAM should be able to handle at least 10 operations per second (Microsoft has mentioned that it feels confident that that hardware can handle 18 operations per second). All you need is 3.7 operations per second for 1,000 people doing 50 operations a day. You can see why I think the starting hardware requirements are sufficient for most small to medium businesses. Of course, I don’t really trust Microsoft’s ideal that a 1GHz server can handle 9 operations per second. However, under normal circumstances, I could comfortably see at least 10 operations per second being safely handled by the 2.5GHz starting specifications given—especially with 1GB or more of RAM. Remember, just like the processor, RAM is important, if only so the server can render pages efficiently. Keep in mind that each web application a server hosts does increase the amount of RAM the server uses. More web applications, means more RAM. Be cautious though. SharePoint often rapidly increases in use, and an increase in the percentage of people using it. As SharePoint catches on, you might find yourself at peak usage more often than not. That’s why you need to monitor how your SharePoint server handles the stress of use, just in case.
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Performance Monitoring You might assume that SharePoint has performance monitoring tools—but it doesn’t. It doesn’t need them. Windows Server 2003 already has a Performance Monitor for that sort of thing. SharePoint does have a Usage Analysis utility, but it only reports usage activity on sites and web pages. Performance Monitor is easy to use, well-documented, and should be a regular part of your server maintenance arsenal. As an added bonus, there are performance counters specific to SharePoint that can be used in conjunction with the usage analysis data to manage your SharePoint server. They give you all the more reason to use Performance Monitor to monitor your SharePoint servers. See Chapter 12, “Maintenance and Monitoring,’’ for more details.
Additional Performance Considerations You’ll want to keep an eye on these items that will increase your processor’s load. Alerts Users can set alerts on changes in a list or library. Alerts are scheduled and, therefore, keep the SharePoint Timer Services busy. Limit the number of alerts your users can have running at any given time. It will save your processor. Alerts can be configured with a user limit, or disabled altogether. Indexing The server that will be indexing site collection content will have to support the increased load on the processor. If you can, try not to index every 5 minutes or less. Instead, consider indexing every hour or at certain times of the day, which would be better. This can be difficult if you expect SharePoint to almost instantaneously index and search new items; just keep it in mind if you are trying to squeeze as many operations per second as you can from your server. Usage Analysis Sharepoint can analyze site usage, and deliver detailed reports. However, analyzing the usage logs takes a considerable amount of processor power for the SharePoint. Try to schedule the analysis to occur during a long downtime, usually sometime around 3:00 A.M. Web Parts Your developers may go crazy with the power of web parts. Be careful; some web parts (depending on what they do and how they were coded) can be resource hogs. Stay well below 50 web parts per page—and that includes the hidden ones. Home pages, where web parts are usually found, can be overwhelmingly busy.
Storage Planning When you’re considering performance issues, don’t forget to plan for adequate storage. If you plan to have SharePoint and the SSEE database on the same server, you’ll need extra RAM because SQL uses quite a bit. But more specifically, it will require much more storage space than SharePoint alone. Even if your SharePoint databases—particularly the content database, which holds all of SharePoint’s precious content—are stored on a different SQL server, planning for storage is still important. Consider this, the maximum default size allowed for document uploads is 50MB. In my experience, a 100-page Word document is about 5MB. So, a maximum of 50MB is usually more than sufficient for a Word document. Of course, you can adjust the size; this is just a good default. But of course, if you upload more than Word files, you may need to change that limit.
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It goes without saying that storage needs will depend on how your users will use the lists and libraries on your SharePoint sites. Assume they are creating marketing materials to send out every quarter, and they are storing them and collaborating on them in a document library. If they create five major documents each quarter, that would be 20 large documents per year, possibly up to 10MB per document. That could be 200MB of space for those documents alone. If other people manage the images in a picture library, and the material had 10 large, full color pictures per document, that could be 2,000MB (2GB) per year for that picture library in addition to its related document library. You could need gigs and gigs of hard drive space—and that doesn’t include versioning. If you have Versioning enabled in your document libraries, there will be multiple copies (as many copies as you allow when you set up versioning) of each document. Therefore, if versioning (say four major versions, and three minor versions per document) were enabled in the previous scenario, then at least 1.4GB per year would be needed for versioning in the marketing document library alone. Keep in mind that versioning can be allowed for most lists as well. Most list entries, when stored in the content database, are tiny—just a few KB, if that. However, if you enable attachments for the libraries, those files (by default less than 50MB) will be saved with those list items, increasing the size of your content database in ways you may not have intended. And don’t forget about incoming email. If you configure an incoming email enabled list or library to save original emails, those emails (including attachments) need to be stored in the content database too. You also need to consider that, depending on what you allow, users can easily create their own document workspace subsites from a document if they need additional team work to collaborate. When a document workspace is spun off of a document, it takes a copy of the original document with it. An additional site will need to be stored in the content database, and a copy of that document with its own versions will be stored on that site. That document will eventually be merged up to the original document workspace. However, until then (and until you delete the document workspace when it’s done) that document (and its workspace) is yet another thing requiring storage. You can also allow users to create their own site collections (with Self-Site Creation), this adds yet more storage overhead to the SharePoint content databases. Finally, remember that the more stuff you have in SharePoint, the more stuff you will have in the Search database. It holds the indexed search data for documents, list entries, and page content (it does not index attached files); that data is stored on the SharePoint server itself and merged regularly into the Search database. To make sure that it returns only the entries that the user making the query is allowed to see, Search also records the Access Control List information for every indexed entry. Generally Search is only allowed to store indexed word entries that equal about 40 percent of the original document’s size, with a maximum of 64MB of stored words for a single document. That is well over the 50MB limit, but that’s a maximum hard limit regardless. That means if you have 20 documents in a library, the search database can have (maximum) 1.3GB of entries in the Search database for that library alone. Of course, if the documents themselves are never over 50MB, and Search sticks to its 40-percent limit for each document, then that would be no more than 20MB of indexed entries per document, and therefore (going with our scenario) about 400MB stored in the Search database for that one document library. When you’re deciding how much storage space your SharePoint server should use in SQL, consider this: ◆
You need to have an idea of what your users are going to do. Estimate how many documents they are going to be collaborating on and storing. Think about what lists they will be using, and how they will be used.
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Plan how you are going to manage attachments and versioning.
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Plan how you are going to manage user websites—especially ones generated for document and meeting workspaces.
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Plan on using site collection quota templates to keep site collection storage in check (in addition to limiting site collections per content database). Remember the Recycle Bins as well. The End user Recycle Bin contents at the site level are part of the site collection’s quota, so keep an eye on it. But the second stage, site collection level Recycle Bin can have a quota that is a certain percentage of its site collection’s quota, but keep in mind that is in addition to the site collection’s quota. That can cause an unexpected increase in storage requirements if you aren’t prepared. Remember to empty your recycle bins to save space.
Once you can estimate what you need, double that space. At least, always have 25 percent more space than you expect to need. Always leave room to bloat. You will never go wrong. It’s great if SharePoint works, but if you have no more room to store SharePoint’s data, the users will be upset. Keep in mind that your environment may be different; after you install your SharePoint server, make sure you monitor the activity. Create a test group that represents a small but measurable sample of your expected users. See how many of them use the server, when they use it, how they use it, and how much they store on the server. Then multiply the increase in resources based on their activities by an estimate of how many more users will be doing the same sorts of things when the server goes live. If you don’t think the suggested hardware will be up to the task, improve it. Plan for at least 10 percent more growth than you expect—just in case. It’s better to find out that your system is not adequate now than to find out when everyone is using it. For goodness sakes, storage is cheap. Use RAID to make your storage fault tolerant; mirror the web servers. If there is drive failure, you’ll be grateful you did.
Speaking of Storage Although I am primarily referring to SharePoint’s hardware needs, do not neglect SQL’s needs. If you are going to use SQL, understand that it is as important as the SharePoint server itself in the performance of your SharePoint sites. Do not skimp on the hardware, particularly RAM and storage. Using RAID drives and even clustering are great ideas to help keep all that important data available.
Software Limitations In addition to its hardware limitations, SharePoint has its software limitations. Microsoft beat the heck out of some servers to see how they performed; they found that when certain objects reached a maximum number, performance degraded significantly. This list of limitations is referred to as the guidelines of acceptable performance. These guidelines are something to keep in mind if your simple SharePoint Server Farm install becomes a large, busy server farm. These limitations are probably caused by a combination of the OS, IIS, and SQL performance limitations impacting SharePoint. These limits are something to remember when you are planning your SharePoint objects, such as site collections, lists, and users.
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Table 1.1 provides a list of object limitations you need to know. At this point you may not really realize the importance of some of these objects, but you will. It’s always good to know up front what limitations there might be for something in case you might end up being responsible for it.
Table 1.1:
Guidelines for Acceptable Performance
Object
Number for Acceptable Performance
Website
250,000 per site collection, but performance can degrade as more sites are added. 2,000 per website. This limit is due to the fact that enumerating the subsites of a site degrades after 2,000. 5 million per library maximum, depending on the size of the documents. Keep in mind that viewing items in a large list or library can slow performance. Use list indexing, and consider making list or library views that filter content to 1,000 items or less per view. Generally, the maximum is 50MB. This can be set to a larger number, but it is not suggested. 2,000 per website. They become difficult to enumerate past that point. 256 per list (not a hard limit, the performance just degrades at that point). 50 per page. If they are complex web parts, the maximum decreases. 2,000 for libraries, and 4,096 for lists. Not a hard limit, but performance does degrade. 2 million per website. Do not add users individually if you can help it, because many more can be added using MS security groups. 2,000 per website. The ACL size limits the number of users and groups in a website, but it does not affect the number of users in a group. 50 million per search index. One index server is supported per search server or server farm. One search server can support up to 100 content databases. The number of search servers on a farm is based on the number of web applications being supported. 100 per web application. Performance degrades after adding 100. Consider creating a different web application before that point. 50,000 per web application (or about 50,000 per database). This is a soft limit but it causes performance degradation. 64. This is an IIS limitation, not SharePoint directly. It also could vary depending on load. 8 web servers to 1 database server. The performance degrades, but it can vary depending on environment. 3 web servers per DC, depending on how much authentication is being done. 10 (the approximate number based on performance limitations of the embedded database).
Subsite Document
Document Size List Field Type Web Part Columns Users in Groups Security Principals
Indexed Documents Search Servers
Content Databases Site Collections Web Applications per SharePoint Server Web Server to Database Server Ratio Web Server to Domain Controller Web Applications per SharePoint Server (Basic Install)
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Enumerating content in libraries and lists can be resource intensive. To ease that burden, if you have more than 2,000 items per list or library, you can limit the number of items viewed by default to 1,000, index a field in the list (only index if the list is very large, because indexing speeds up viewing a list but does add a resource load), or consider breaking up the flat list or library by using folders to organize the items to improve performance (it’s okay if this makes little sense now; it will come up again). These hardware and software factors should help you avoid the slow decay of your SharePoint server’s performance. Remember to monitor, monitor, monitor. It does no good to have logs if you don’t read them. Be prepared for the need to scale out or upgrade before someone else has to tell you to. If you ever overestimate the performance requirements, it’s good to know that too. So that’s it. You’ve seen behind the curtain of SharePoint and learned about its requirements, limitations, and services. Now you are ready to get started.
The Bottom Line Determine the software and hardware requirements you need for installing SharePoint Services 3.0 SharePoint has some stringent software and hardware requirements. Be sure you know what you need before you become the proud owner of your own SharePoint server or servers. SharePoint depends on Windows 2003 SP1 server components and services in order to function. Master It
What software must be on the server before you install SharePoint?
Identify the three ways of installing SharePoint Services 3.0 Choose the best of the three ways of installing SharePoint Services 3.0 for you. With SharePoint, how you choose to install it defines how it works. Making the wrong choice can come back to haunt you. Know what you’re in for and choose the correct installation type for your business. Master It If you were going to install SharePoint on one server (no existing SQL server) for a small business of about 50 people, what installation type would you choose? Set up the necessary accounts that SharePoint needs to run When SharePoint is installed on a domain, it needs user accounts to assign to its services. Knowing what permissions and roles those accounts require will help you avoid problems when installing and running SharePoint. Master It
What is a Database Access Account? Is it known by any other names?
Recognize the new features and requirements of SharePoint SharePoint has features that require additional planning and setup to function properly. Make sure you know what they are and what they require. Master It What new feature of WSS 3.0 requires SMTP to be running locally on the SharePoint server? Plan for hardware requirements Don’t let SharePoint outgrow its hardware before it really gets started. Prepare for growth. Establish your company’s baseline operations per second and storage needs before installing SharePoint. Master It What is the formula to calculate the operations per second that a SharePoint server would be doing in a given environment?
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Installation Generally, installing a new software product is not the most important part of the process, and you might be wondering why a chapter might be devoted to it. This is why: SharePoint can function differently depending on how it’s installed. Also, to install SharePoint at all, the server must be prepared properly to handle its collaborative goodness. Without preparation, there will be no SharePoint. SharePoint has to be prepared for, then installed properly, and finally, minimally, some settings must be configured in order to simply use the product. Therefore devoting some pages to preparation, installation, and post-installation configuration makes much more sense. In this chapter, you will learn how to: ◆
Prepare for the installation of SharePoint
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Install SharePoint using the Basic and Advanced, Stand-Alone, and Advanced Server Farm installation options
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Determine what gets created when SharePoint installs
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Perform the initial configuration tasks after a SharePoint install (and understand why you perform them)
Preparing for the SharePoint Installation In order to install SharePoint, you’ll need to make a few preparations. This section will discuss the little things that SharePoint requires before it can install and do its thing. To recap (for those of you who read the last chapter) a SharePoint installation requires the following technologies: ◆
Windows Server 2003 (Service Pack 1 or higher)
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Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 (or higher), ASP.NET enabled
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ASP.NET 2.0 (which gets installed as part of .NET Framework 3.0)
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.NET Framework 3.0
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SMTP services (for incoming email support)
.NET Framework 3.0 should be downloaded from the Internet from the Microsoft website.
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Microsoft changes its URLs from time to time, so simply go to Microsoft’s website and search for “.NET Framework 3.0”. Select the download page for .NET Framework 3.0; it should list dotnetfx3setup.exe as the installation file. That will work fine for the installation, but the server will require Internet access for the first half of the process.
Why Is Internet Access Required? The redistributable installer package requires Internet access because the installer listed on that page for download is the bootstrap installer. It is not the full redistributable package it says it is. A bootstrap installer is designed to download quickly; therefore, it does not contain all the files needed to do a full .NET Framework 3.0 install. Instead, it accesses the Internet during installation and fetches the files it is missing, most notably the files specific to the server’s architecture, either x86 or x64. To get the full redistributable package for .NET Framework 3.0 (with all the installation files included), scroll to the Instructions section on the download page that contains the links to the x86 and x64 Redist packages. The full installation packages are called dotnetfx3.exe for x86 and dotnetfx3_x64.exe for x64. Be very careful to choose the correct installation package for the architecture of your server.
IIS 6.0 with SMTP Internet Information Services (IIS) 6.0 is required in order for SharePoint to even have a web interface. Windows Server’s web server capability is due to IIS, and therefore, so is SharePoint’s. Another feature of IIS is the capability to send and receive email using SMTP (Simple Mail Transport Protocol). There has been a long precedent of web servers ofering email capabilities, so it is understandable that IIS would also support SMTP. And, it’s just as understandable that SharePoint would take advantage of that IIS capability as well. If you were to have more than one SharePoint server in the server farm, you only need to enable SMTP if the server will be supporting incoming email. Installing IIS 6.0 with SMTP services requires two stages. The first stage is to install IIS and enable ASP.NET and the second stage is to install the SMTP service. There are a few different ways to do it; however, for convenience, I am going to use the Configuration Wizard to enable IIS 6.0 with ASP.NET and then use Add/Remove Programs ➢ Windows Components to enable SMTP. (Alternatively, you could open the Manage Your Server window and use it to trigger the Configuration Wizard to add the IIS role.) Obviously, you should be logged in with an account that has the right to install software locally.
Keep the Service Pack or Installation Files Handy Your server may need to access either the Service Pack (1 or 2, depending on what you have installed) files or the server installation files when enabling IIS. Be sure you have them handy during this process because you may be prompted for the Service Pack files.
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To install IIS 6.0, just follow these steps:
1. Open the Configuration Wizard (Start ➢ Administrative Tools ➢ Configure Your Server Wizard).
2. Click Next twice, once for the Welcome screen and once for the Preliminary steps screen. 3. Select Application Server from the list of Roles (IIS is considered an application server), and click Next.
4. On the Application Server Options screen, select Enable ASP.NET and click Next (see Figure 2.1).
Figure 2.1 The Application Server options
Make sure that the summary of selections includes: Install Internet Information Services, Enable COM+ for Remote Transactions, Enable Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator (DTC) for Remote Access, and Enable ASP.NET are listed (see Figure 2.2 for confirmation).
5. To install and configure IIS, click Next. 6. When the wizard indicates that the installation is complete, click Finish. The Manage Your Server page will indicate that you indeed have a new application server role on the server. Close out of this page.
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Figure 2.2 The Application Server summary
Enable IIS SMTP Service The next stage in this process installs the IIS SMTP service. To install it, follow these steps:
1. Go to Add or Remove Programs by clicking Start ➢ Control Panel ➢ Add or Remove Programs.
2. In the Add or Remove Programs window, click the Add/Remove Windows Components icon (it will take a moment for the components list to populate).
3. Once the Windows Components Wizard opens, click Application Server. (Do not remove the Application Server check mark. If you do, cancel out and try again. Unchecking the Application Server will cause the wizard to remove IIS). Once you have selected Application Server, click the Details button—because it has additional component parts that can be installed.
4. In the Application Server dialog box (see Figure 2.3), select Internet Information Services (IIS) and click Details.
5. In the Internet Information Services (IIS) dialog box, place a check in SMTP Service checkbox. (The box does not turn gray, which means this component, unlike the two previous components, does not have additional components.)
6. Click OK to accept your selection and back out of the Internet Information Services (IIS) dialog box.
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Figure 2.3 The Application Server dialog box
7. Click OK on the Application Server dialog box. 8. Click Next in the Windows Components Wizard. The wizard will begin installing the SMTP services. When the wizard is done, you should check to see that the IIS and the SMTP service were installed properly. Open the IIS management console by choosing Start➢ Administrative Tools ➢ Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager. As soon as it opens, you may have to click the plus sign next to the listing for the local computer in the tree pane on the left side of the console; then you should see a node for the Default SMTP Virtual Server below it. This means that the SMTP service has been enabled. To confirm that ASP .NET has been enabled, select Web Service Extensions. You will see in the content pane on the right that ASP.NET v1.1.4322 is installed and enabled. This is good because, when ASP .NET 2.0 is installed, it will be enabled as well.
ASP .NET 2.0 and .NET Framework 3.0 The next step in preparing to install SharePoint is to install ASP.NET 2.0 and .NET Framework 3.0. ASP .NET 2.0 is a critical component of SharePoint, enabling it to create .aspx web pages, as well as web parts and other page attributes. And .NET Framework 3.0 is required to enable the SharePoint workflow capabilities. When you install the .NET Framework 3.0, it installs the Windows Workflow Foundation and ASP .NET 2.0 as well. When ASP .NET 2.0 is installed, it will also, as a convenience, be enabled in IIS 6.0 if ASP .NET 1.1 is already enabled there.
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Bear in mind that installing .NET Framework 3.0 will take a little time; how much will depend on your hardware. If you are using the dotnetfx3setup.exe installer, the server must have Internet access to install this component. To install .Net Framework 3.0, follow these steps:
1. Double-click the installer package you downloaded earlier. 2. If you are using the Bootstrap Installer, accept the license agreement for .NET Framework 3.0. The page will indicate how large the file is and how long it should take to download. If you aren’t using the Bootstrap Installer, simply accept the license agreement and installation will begin. After accepting the license agreement, the installation setup window will minimize to the System Tray. To avoid any problems, don’t work on anything else until the installation is complete.
3. Wait for the installation process to complete. After it’s finished, you can check Windows Update for further updates for .NET Framework 3.0 if you’d like.
4. Click Exit to finish the .NET Framework 3.0 installation process. If you’d like to verify that .NET Framework 3.0 installed (other than the event logs or Add/Remove Programs, of course), check the Services console, and scroll down to Windows Presentation Foundation Font Cache 3.0.0.0, which wasn’t on your server before the installation. To prove that the server is now Windows Workflow Foundation–capable, navigate to Program Files ➢ MSBuild ➢ Microsoft folder and you will see a brand new Windows Workflow Foundation folder. Further, to confirm that ASP .NET 2.0 was installed and enabled in IIS, open the IIS manager console and click on the Web Service Extensions node. You’ll see that ASP .NET v2.0.50727 has been enabled (Figure 2.4).
Figure 2.4 ASP.NET 2.0 in the IIS console
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Setup Account As I’ve mentioned before, the account you are using to install SharePoint matters (either as the account you are logged in with, or as the account you use to run the installer). To install SharePoint the account must have the rights and permissions to install software and start services locally on the server. If you are installing SharePoint on one server, the setup account only needs to have the rights and permissions to install software on that server. SharePoint can use local system or network service accounts to run all of its other services, and access its databases locally. If you intend to install SharePoint in a server farm configuration (with SharePoint and SQL on separate servers), the setup account should have the right to install software on all servers in the domain that will be running SharePoint. It must also have Logins access to the SQL server (or server instance to be used by SharePoint, if you are running more than one) as well as hold the DBCreator and SecurityAdmin roles. The setup account creates the configuration database and gives the other service accounts rights to their required databases in SQL.
The Special Roles of the Setup Account in a Server Farm Configuration If you’re planning to use SharePoint in a Server Farm configuration, the account used to install SharePoint on the servers needs to have the rights and permissions to install software on each server locally. You can use an account that has been added as a local Administrator to each server, or you can make the setup account a member of the Domain Admins group for the Active Directory domain. In a Server Farm configuration, the setup account must also be assigned special roles on the SQL server. If you are not responsible for these tasks, you can simply ask the appropriate Active Directory administrator to create an account that is in the Domain Admins group, and then ask the SQL DBA to add that account to the Logins, DBCreator, and SecurityAdmin roles. However, if you need to do it, here’s how. To add a user to Active Directory and add them to the Domain Admins group, follow these steps: 1. Open the Active Directory Users And Computers console by choosing Start ➢ Administrative Tools ➢ Active Directory Users and Computers.
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2. Click the Users node, and then click the Add Users button (it looks like a head with a sparkle on the back of it). 3. In the New Object-User dialog box, enter the First Name and User Logon Name. I’m using setupacct for both. Despite the fact that this account doesn’t have a first and last name, you must enter something for one or the other. If you only add a logon name, the Next button will remain grayed out. 4. Click Next, and enter a password. I suggest you uncheck “User must change password at next logon.” Depending on your environment’s password policy, you might want to check the Password Never Expires and User Cannot Change Password checkboxes. That way, if the account is compromised, the attacker cannot change the password to one that you don’t know. 5. Click Next when you have finished setting up the password. Confirm that the name, logon name, and password settings are correct, and click Finish. The account you created will be highlighted in the console. 6. To add the new setup account to the Domain Admins group, right-click the username and select Add to a group from the popup menu. 7. In the Select Group dialog box, verify that you are selecting from the correct location (it should be your domain).
8. In the Enter The Object Name To Select field, enter domain admins and click the Check Names button. Domain Admins should become title capitalized and underlined, which means that Check Names found it. Click OK. 9. A dialog box should come notify you that the Add To Group operation was successful. Click OK. To add the setup account to the correct roles in Microsoft SQL Server 2005, follow these steps (the same roles apply in SQL 2000 sp3 but the interface is a bit different): 1. On the Server running SQL, open the SQL Server Management Studio console by choosing Start ➢ All Programs ➢ Microsoft SQL Server 2005 ➢ SQL Server Management Studio.
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2. Make sure you are connecting to the correct server (and server instance if necessary) and server type (in this case, database engine), with the correct authentication, username, and password. Click Connect (my example server is RR1, and I am using the default account for Windows Authentication). See the following figure for more information.
Keep in mind that you need to add the setup account to the SQL Server Logins role, so it can be added to the SecurityAdmins and DBCreator roles. 3. To do this, open the Security node.
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4. Right-click the Logins node or right-click Logins on the Summary page in the detail pane. In the popup menu, select New Login. 5. In the New Login window that appears, enter the name of your setup account in the domain\ username format in Login Name field (my domain is dem0tek, and my setup account is setupacct).
6. While you’re creating the setup account as a Login role, you can add it to the necessary server roles. To do this, select Server Roles on the Select a Page pane on the left side of the New Logins window.
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7. Check DBCreator and SecurityAdmin in the Server Roles list, and click OK. That should take you back to the SQL Server Management Studio console. Your setup account should be a Logins account and the setup account should be added to the SQL Logins, DBCreator, and SecurityAdmin roles. Verify that your SQL server is prepared for remote access from the SharePoint server. If SQL is not ready for remote access, SharePoint will not be able to access the server to create the databases it needs. If you try to do a server farm install and keep failing, no matter how perfect your settings, follow these steps to create the configuration database: 1. Check to see if Remote Connections is set up. In SQL 2005, you’ll need to use the SQL Server Surface Area Configuration Tool. You can select it by choosing Start ➢ All Programs ➢ Microsoft SQL Server 2005 ➢ Configuration Tool ➢ SQL Server Surface Area Configuration. 2. In the SQL Server 2005 Surface Area Configuration window, in the Configure Surface Area For Localhost section, select Surface Area Configuration For Services And Connections.
3. In the window that opens, in the services and connections list on the left, make certain that you are using the correct server instance (mine is the default MSSQLSERVER instance), then select Remote Connections. In the configuration area on the right of this selection, you’ll specify whether or not SQL 2005 will allow remote connections, which SharePoint needs. Choose Local and Remote connections, and then select Using TCP/IP and Named Pipes (because locally that is what SQL uses). This will make SQL available to SharePoint.
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4. When you’ve made your selections, click OK. Close the SQL Server 2005 Surface Area Configuration window.
Service Accounts Additional accounts should be specified during the configuration of SharePoint in a server farm scenario. In a single server environment, the local service and network service accounts will work fine as the account identities for all of SharePoint’s services. Domain accounts come into play only when the SharePoint services may need to access resources (like databases on a remote SQL server) that are not on the local server.
Being Unique is Useful but Not Necessary EachSharePointserviceandapplicationpoolrequiresausercontext(orserviceaccountidentity)toaccess resources with. I tend to have a domain user account for each one, but those services and application pools don’t require unique accounts, as long as the account they all use has the correct permissions for whatever the services do. As a matter of fact, in some networking environments where controlling the number of domain accounts is an issue, it is reasonable to create one domain account that you apply to all services except the database access account—that account is so powerful it should never be applied to any other service.
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However, like myself, you may prefer to separate tasks by using separate service accounts. If one service crashes, it won’t take the others with it (by tying up the service account identity). Furthermore, it helps ¨ ber keep services more secure. If a unique account is compromised, it can do less damage than the one u account on which all services depend.
For a server farm installation, in addition to the setup account, the Database Access (server farm), Search, Index (content access), and Content Database Access services also require an account context in which to run. My example of the domain user accounts I will be using to install SharePoint is listed below and shown in Figure 2.5.:
Figure 2.5 The Domain accounts for SharePoint
Database Access Account Wssconfig. This account is the server farm or database access account and will be the owner of the configuration database. It will create all the other databases used by SharePoint, add the necessary accounts to SQL, and give them the correct database access. It also is the SharePoint Timer service account, and the application pool identity for Central Administration. Search Account Wsssearch. This account is one of the owners of the search database, and it answers search queries.
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Content Access Account Wssindex. This account is one of the owners of the search database. It crawls and indexes SharePoint content. It must have read access to all search enabled content databases. Content Database Account Wsscontent. This account owns and accesses the content database of a web application, such as the first SharePoint site. Remember that defining these accounts is necessary only if SQL and SharePoint are going to run on different servers. Otherwise, you can still use separate accounts if you’d like, but if SQL and SharePoint are running on the same server, the local service and network service accounts will work fine. When SharePoint initially installs, someone needs to configure it. Therefore, when Central Administration (the first SharePoint site made so you can further configure and manage SharePoint) is created, the setup account and (just in case) built-in Administrators are added as Farm Administrators by default. Farm Administrators are users that are added to the Central Administration site for the purpose of administering SharePoint. It’s called Farm Administrators even if SharePoint is installed on only one server. You can add additional users to Central Administration to be authorized as Farm Administrators (or remove them) as needed. When you create other sites (and site collections), they do not have these accounts available for log in by default. You have to specify the primary and secondary administrators for the site before the site is created. At that point, to get into the site, you must log in with one of those accounts (the primary is obviously required, and the secondary isn’t).
A SharePoint Administration Utility Account Many administrators may use their own accounts to manage SharePoint, but I prefer to keep my SharePoint administrative account separate from my personal domain account. Because of this, I have a Domain Admins account called shareadmin that I use specifically to manage and administer the server the SharePoint Services runs on, as well as SharePoint itself. The account doesn’t need to be a Domain Admin, as long as it is a local Administrator for each of the SharePoint servers. However, the point is to have an account with the right to install software, run tools, manage server roles (such as IIS) and services locally on all SharePoint servers on the domain. In addition, to administer SharePoint, I add the account to Central Administration as a Farm Administrator. This makes it possible for the account to be authorized to manage SharePoint, create and configure new web applications, site collections, do backups, and more. This account, with those rights and permissions, can use the SharePoint command line tool, STSADM, to manage SharePoint from the command line. It also can install and administer SharePoint features and solutions, web parts, and other SharePoint specific utilities. Finally, there are times, when I am creating new site collections, testing new templates, or taking over a site collection, I might use that account as a primary or secondary site collection administrator. This makes it possible to log into the site collection, configure and test it before replacing the account with the rightful owner’s account when all work is complete.
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Overall, my SharePoint admin account is used for all of my SharePoint needs. It allows me to go from the desktop of the server running SharePoint, to the command line to use STSADM to configure and manage SharePoint, to the SharePoint administrative interface, all without having to change logins. This account may not fit all network security models, but I have found it useful enough that I thought it was worth mentioning to someone who, in the beginning of their experiences with SharePoint, might find it useful too.
At this point you should be all set to install SharePoint. You should have installed IIS 6.0 with ASP.NET enabled and the SMTP service, .NET Framework 3.0 and ASP.NET 2.0. You should have also set up the necessary service accounts, depending on the installation you plan to do. We’re going to do a Basic installation first. It will demonstrate how to install SharePoint in a single server environment. In this case, the installation will be entirely automated, all services will be configured to use local service and network service accounts, and a SSEE database engine will be installed to handle all of SharePoint’s database needs. After that installation is confirmed, we’ll do a more advanced server farm installation. This type of installation is not as automated, and will require you to specify the location of the SharePoint databases, as well the user accounts that the services will be using. After configuration, the post installation tasks will be covered. These tasks will be the same regardless of installation type.
Installing on Server 2008 The preparation and installation steps for this chapter are being done in Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1(Service Pack 2 would be fine as well). Preparing for SharePoint is different, and easier, on Windows Server 2008. If you are installing SharePoint as a server role in Server 2008, the steps to prepare are built into the server role set up process. See the TechNet article “Install Windows SharePoint Services in the Windows Server 2008 operating system.” Otherwise please consult the Help files for the Windows SharePoint Services server role on your server for more information. Keep in mind that the IIS version on Server 2008 is 7.0 and therefore will require that IIS 6.0 Management Compatibility be enabled for backward compatibility.
Basic Installation When you choose to do a Basic installation of SharePoint, you are choosing to have a single server SharePoint configuration, installing SQL Server Embedded Edition locally. This will cause all databases and services used by SharePoint to be set up automatically, using local accounts. The installation will occur in two parts, which is standard operational procedure for SharePoint version 3.0: the installation itself, and then the configuration. However, with the Basic and standalone installations, configuration will be handled without you. Remember that this server will need the resources to handle both SharePoint and its databases on one machine. Plan accordingly. Before you install SharePoint, make certain that you are logged in with the setup account. In my example, that would be the setupacct account created earlier in the chapter. This account will,
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by default, be the SharePoint Farm Administrator in Central Administration, and be the Primary Administrator of the first SharePoint web application and site collection. To install this version of SharePoint on a Server 2003 SP1, SP2, or R2 server, you must download the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 installer from Microsoft. You can search the Microsoft site for “Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 download” and select the download details for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0. The installer file should be called SharePoint.exe.
Architecture Specifics There are separate SharePoint installers for x86 and x64, despite the fact that the actual installation files have the same name. The x64 SharePoint.exe file is 85.6 MB, and the x86 SharePoint.exe file is 77.7MB. So, despite the fact that they have the same name, they contain differing amounts of code. I wouldn’t risk using the wrong architecture version of the file.
1. While logged in as your setup account, double-click the SharePoint.exe. Accept the terms of the license agreement and click Continue (you can’t continue without agreeing).
2. The Choose the Installation You Want screen will display two options: Basic and Advanced. (See Figure 2.6.) The Basic button is used to install a single server using the default settings.
Figure 2.6 The SharePoint Basic and Advanced installation options
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The Advanced button offers two additional installation options, Server Farm and Stand-alone (which is surprisingly similar to the Basic installation).
3. To perform the Basic installation, click the Basic button.
May I Help You? The little question mark in a circle icon in the bottom-left corner of the installer window for SharePoint is the Help icon. Clicking it is the only way to get help during the installation process. I wonder why they made it so tiny? Maybe they were hoping it wouldn’t be needed.
From this point on, the installation process will continue without your intervention. However you will be prompted (see Figure 2.7) to start the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard, after the installation files have been copied and update files applied.
4. There is no reason to delay configuration. Therefore, make sure that the box is checked to run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard, and click Close.
5. The Welcome screen for the Wizard will appear. Click Next to continue.
Figure 2.7 The SharePoint Configuration Wizard prompt
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A dialog box will warn you that some services are going to be reset during configuration (Figure 2.8)—the most important one being the Internet Information Services (IIS). If you are hosting any other websites on this machine, service will be interrupted during this process.
Figure 2.8 The Service Reset warning
6. To continue the configuration process, click Yes in the dialog box. The Configuration Wizard will begin to perform 10 configuration tasks including: creating the configuration database, securing resources, registering SharePoint Services and features, provisioning the web applications, creating sample data, installing application content files, and finalizing configuration. This process will take some time, depending on the server’s resources. Eventually it will stop at the Configuration Successful screen.
Configuration Failure If the configuration fails, you’ll get a Configuration Failure screen. It will contain information about what happened (for example, losing access to the SQL server), so you can fix it.
The Configuration Successful screen will indicate that you will be taken to the default SharePoint Web Application home page. This is the SharePoint site that contains all the pages, lists, libraries, and web parts that will be accessed by your users, all ready to go. A lot of the setup configuration has already been done so you can hit the ground running.
7. To complete configuration, click Finish. 8. Your web browser will immediately open and prompt you to log in (Figure 2.9). Right now SharePoint only has one user (other than the built-in Administrators): the account you used to install it, the setup account. Use that account to login (my example is dem0tek\setupacct). Add the SharePoint site to your Trusted Sites Zone when you’re prompted to do so. Trusted sites belong to an Internet Explorer security level that allows ActiveX controls to run on your computer. If the site is not added to the Trusted Sites Zone, some page properties may not function correctly. Your new SharePoint team site will open in the browser. As you can see in Figure 2.10, the address for this site is the server machine name. SharePoint starts identifying itself by the machine
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Figure 2.9 The login screen
Figure 2.10 The SharePoint Team site
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name of the server on which it is loaded. In this case, that is SP1. Because the SharePoint site (as you will see later) is set to port 80, it is listening for any HTTP traffic for the server and will respond with the SharePoint content if anyone asks. You can have SharePoint respond to other kinds of addresses, such as a fully qualified domain name (FQDN), but for right now the machine name is the default. SharePoint can seem a little anticlimactic when you first see it. With a Home tab at the top, the navigation bar on the left that displays the lists, sites, people, Recycle Bin, and document library that are set up during installation. In the center of the page is the web part area, with a few web parts there for you to get a feel for them. At the top right are the Welcome menu (indicating your login name, which is useful if you’ve forgotten who you are logged in as), the Search field, and the Help icon. SharePoint is not supposed to be busy and intimidating; but easy on the eyes, uncluttered, and easy to use. If you are not intimidated, then SharePoint has achieved its objective. That’s it. That’s all it takes to install SharePoint using the Basic option. You can immediately begin to use and manage it without any additional effort. All databases and services were created and configured automatically for you. However, I don’t know about you, but helplessly watching a wizard do mysterious things to my server, regardless of the immediate outcome, makes me nervous. One of the first things I do, after the product is installed and running, is check to see what actually changed on the server in order for the product to function properly. It’s also helpful to get to know what a good installation looks like, under the hood, so you’ll recognize what’s missing should an install go bad. So, now that SharePoint is up and running, let’s see what actually happened during the SharePoint Basic installation.
Confirming the Installation of the Windows Internal Databases During the Basic installation, SharePoint installed the Windows Internal Database (SQL Server Embedded Edition, or SSEE) engine and the four databases that it requires. To check this, you are going to have to search a little in the file system. One of the flaws of the Basic install is the databases are created under a folder called SYSMSI, in the Windows folder. The full path is %winddir%\SYSMSI\SSEE\MSSQL.2005\MSSQL\Data That folder contains the databases (and their logs) that SSEE requires: master, model, mssqlststemresource, and temdb. The other four databases are the ones created and used by SharePoint. As you can see in Figure 2.11, those files are:
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The AdminContent database for the Central Administration website
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The Configuration database for the server (which controls the configuration of SharePoint, the web applications, site collections, sites, and even some web parts)
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The Content database for the SharePoint site itself
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The Search database
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Figure 2.11 SharePoint’s SSEE databases
You may have noticed that the AdminContent and Config databases have nice long GUIDs tacked onto their name. That’s just what happens when SharePoint creates them, and it is nothing to be concerned about. It simply insures that the database names are unique.
Checking IIS for Web Site Creation The next thing to check is IIS to see if SharePoint has created the Web Sites the way it was supposed to create them. The default Web Site should be stopped (so it doesn’t interfere with SharePoint using port 80 for the SharePoint sites), and a SharePoint-80 Web Site, as well as a Central Administration Web Site, should have been created. You should recognize these web application names from Chapter 1; SharePoint-80 is the name of the default web application SharePoint creates during the Basic installation. This web application contains the default top-level site you accessed when the installation completed. Central Administration is, as the name implies, the web application containing the top-level site used to configure all SharePoint server, or server farm, settings. To check the changes SharePoint made in IIS, perform the following steps:
1. Open the IIS management console by choosing Start ➢ Administrative Tools ➢ Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager.
2. In the console tree pane, click the plus next to your server name, and then click the plus sign next to the Web Sites node. Notice in Figure 2.12 that the default Web Site has been stopped (SharePoint stopped it to avoid harming whatever might be stored there) and that two new Web Sites have been created: SharePoint Central Administration v3 and SharePoint-80.
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Figure 2.12 New Web Sites in IIS
Checking the Application Pools You may remember from the previous chapter that when SharePoint creates web applications (IIS Web Sites), those web applications have to have application pools that require an account identity to function properly. Those accounts are the ones that can be given the permissions the application pools require. Because SharePoint is using only one server, these accounts should be built-in local accounts because they do not need to access anything other than the local server’s resources. To confirm the application pool of the Central Administration Web Site, click the plus sign next to the Application Pools node, right-click the SharePoint Central Administration v3 application pool, and select Properties (see Figure 2.13). In the SharePoint Central Administration Application Pool Properties dialog box, select the Identity tab.
Figure 2.13 The IIS Web application pool popup menu
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Figure 2.14 The Application Pool Identity
The selected Application Pool Identity is a predefined Network Service account (see Figure 2.14). This is perfectly acceptable for a Basic installation. Close the dialog box. You can confirm that the SharePoint-80 website is using the correct application pool and identity by following the same steps.
Confirming Central Administration’s Application Pool and Port You might recall that Central Administration uses a different port number than the SharePoint site does. With the Basic install, that port is assigned automatically. To confirm what that number is, go to the properties of the Central Administration v3 Web Site. While you’re there, make sure that that web application is using the correct application pool. Even though the correct pool exists, someone can change the pool the Web Site is using. It’s always good to know where to go to confirm that the correct one is selected. In the IIS management console, you should be able to see the Web Sites available on your server. Right-click the SharePoint Central Administration v3 Web Site (see Figure 2.15) and click Properties.
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Figure 2.15 The Central Administration’s Web Site in IIS
On the Web Site tab in the SharePoint Central Administration v3 Properties dialog box, note the TCP port. (In Figure 2.16, the port is 36971.) That port was automatically assigned. Don’t change it; if you do, SharePoint’s configuration database will not know that you did.
Figure 2.16 Central Administration’s unique TCP/IP port
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Figure 2.17 Central Administration’s application pool
You don’t really need to remember the port number to access the site from the local server, because it is listed in the Administrative Tools menu. However, it’s useful to know in order to access the site from a machine on the network other than the SharePoint server. This dialog box also has the tab that let’s you see what application pool this Web Site is using. Click the Home Directory tab, and check the Application Pool field at the bottom of the page (Figure 2.17). It should be SharePoint Central Administration v3, which you should recognize from the application pools earlier in this section. You can use the same steps to confirm that the SharePoint-80 Web Site is using the SharePoint-80 application pool.
Checking SharePoint’s Services Finally, to make certain that SharePoint has created, registered, and is running all of the correct services, open the Services console by going to the Start menu ➢ Administrative Tools ➢ Services.
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You should see that the SQL Server 2005 Embedded Edition service is running. Its associated SQL Server VSS Writer, which integrates backup and restore with Windows Volume Shadow Copy is also running. If you scroll down, you should see the five Windows SharePoint Services. Windows SharePoint Services Administration Service Name SPAdmin, this service performs the administrative tasks that the Timer job cannot do, and it runs in the Local System context. Windows SharePoint Services Search Service Name SPSearch, this service provides full-text indexing and search for SharePoint content, and it runs in the LocalService account context for the Basic Install. Windows SharePoint Services Timer Service Name SPTimerV3, this service is the one that does all jobs that require timing, like collecting incoming mail, sending alerts and notifications, and doing workflows and runs in the NetworkService account context. Windows SharePoint Services Tracing Service Name SPTrace, this service supports SharePoint’s trace logs and runs in the LocalService account context. Windows SharePoint Services VSS Writer Service Name SPWriter, this service allows SharePoint to integrate with Windows Volume Shadow Copy and the SQL VSS Writer and runs in the Local System context. To confirm the service names and the logon identities of these services, double-click each service and then select the Log On tab. When you are finished checking the logon information, click Cancel.
Checking the Central Administration Site To finish confirming this installation, you only need to open Central Administration (the other administrative site SharePoint created) to make sure it works and check the server’s configuration settings. For your convenience, SharePoint added the shortcut for the Central Administration site to the Administrative Tools menu on the server where you installed SharePoint. The shortcut allows you to access the Central Administration website without knowing the port number. To open the Central Administration site, select Start ➢ Administrative Tools ➢ SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration. Log in using the setup account you used to install SharePoint (that account is just about the only member of SharePoint at this point, because you haven’t added anyone else). In my example, that account would be dem0tek\setupacct. After you log in, the Central Administration site’s home page should appear. Notice that its design is similar to the SharePoint site’s home page. The configuration settings are divided between server farm operations and web application management, both of which are located on their own pages, accessible by the navigation bar on the left of the page, or the tabs above it. At the center/right of the navigation bar is the web parts area of the page, containing web parts such as Administrator Tasks, Farm Topology, and Resources. Currently, at least eight administrator tasks are generated by default after each installation of SharePoint (to keep you from forgetting to do some of the initial setup tasks that SharePoint may require to work properly). We will go over some of these tasks at the end of this chapter in the Post-Installation Tasks section. Feel free to go to that section and finish configuration there. In the Farm Topology web part is a list of servers that are in the server farm (in a Basic installation there can be only one), and what services are running on each.
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Figure 2.18 Central Administration Home Page
At the top right of the Central Administration home page, SharePoint indicates the account with which you are logged in (this nice feature was not available in the previous version). Also on the top right is the Help icon, so subtle you could miss it (Figure 2.18).
Advanced Server Farm Installation Verify that your pre-installation preparations are complete. In particular, prepare the domain accounts that you plan to use for your SharePoint Services. Confirm that your server is a member of the domain. Make sure that you know the name (and possibly the instance name where applicable) of the SQL server that will contain the SharePoint databases. Once you are prepared, make sure that you are logged in to the server where you will be doing the installation as your SharePoint setup account. (My example’s is setupacct, or more accurately dem0tek\setupacct, because dem0tek is the fictitious domain for this book and setupacct is a domain user.) Or prepare to run the SharePoint installer using the setup account’s context. Remember that to install SharePoint on a Server 2003 Service Pack 1 or R2 server, you must download the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 installer, SharePoint.exe from Microsoft (you can search the Microsoft site for “Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 download” and select the download details for Windows SharePoint Services 3.0). Make certain that you are using the version of the installer file that is correct for your server’s architecture. Once you’ve downloaded the SharePoint installer, and logged in as your setup account, follow these steps:
1. Double-click SharePoint.exe. 2. On the Software License Terms page, check the box at the bottom of the screen next to accept the terms of the agreement. If you don’t agree, you can’t install SharePoint. Click Continue.
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3. On the next SharePoint installer screen, you’ll see two buttons to select the type of installation you will be doing. You are going to install a server farm, so you need to choose settings for a SharePoint farm and, therefore, must click Advanced.
4. The next screen has three tabs: Server Type, Data Location, and Feedback (see Figure 2.19). The Basic installation does not offer this screen. On the Server Type tab, you are offered the opportunity to specify how you want SharePoint to be installed on this server. You can choose to do a Stand-Alone installation (which is exactly like a Basic installation except you can indicate where the search index files are stored on the server, and you can enable the Customer Experience Improvement Program’s feedback mechanism). You also can choose the Web Front End option. This option is known as a Server Farm installation (or SharePoint Farm, because it will be a farm of SharePoint servers). When you install SharePoint in a server farm configuration, the SharePoint server will be a web server, serving up SharePoint web pages while a different server hosts SQL.
Figure 2.19 Advanced installation options
Server Farm in a Single Box When you install SharePoint in a server farm configuration, it is expected that the SharePoint server will be dedicated as a web front end server and a different server will support the SQL databases necessary for SharePoint to function. However, you can have SQL (2000 sp3 or higher) server running on the server where you intend to install SharePoint. This can be useful if you are trying to combine roles to save on hardware resources. It allows you to have a single server dedicated to SharePoint and its databases, giving you the chance to expand to a server farm (by installing SharePoint as addition web front end servers in the farm) with all servers pointing to the first server’s databases in SQL if necessary.
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On the Data Location tab, you can specify where the index files will be stored for this installation. If you are planning to enable the Search service on this server and use it to do indexing, then it is a good idea to locate those index files on a different drive or partition other than the system files. The index files can become very large because they can contain lists of all the up-to-date, unique words in your SharePoint content. This includes both field data for the lists and libraries (considered metadata in SharePoint) and full text data from library documents. You can sign up for the Customer Experience Improvement Program on the Feedback tab. This program sends anonymous data back to Microsoft about how SharePoint is being used, whether or not it is working, and other data. This program requires regular access to the Internet. If you want to help Microsoft by sending them information about your use of SharePoint and report to them when errors are encountered, choose the recommended option.
Stand-Alone’s Dirty Little Secret You might wonder why there is a Stand-Alone Installation option when that is what the Basic installation actually is. The Stand-Alone Installation option can be a little misleading. You might think that the difference between a Stand-Alone installation and a Basic one is that the Basic installation installs the Windows Internal Database (WID) as well as SharePoint and, therefore, the Stand-Alone installation would probably indicate that SharePoint is installing on a server that also hosts an existing instance of SQL, with no WID needed. However, that is not the case. That theory is practical and logical, but it is not the way things work. Although it may seem illogical, both the Stand-Alone and Basic Installation options install SharePoint and the Windows Internal Database (SSEE). There is actually no difference between the Basic and StandAlone installations except for the three-tab installation screen. This screen is supposed to give the person doing the Stand-Alone installation a chance to choose its data location. If you read through the “Basic Installation” section, you know that type of installation installs the SSEE databases in a folder under %SYSVOL%—usually in c:\WINDOWS. You have no choice in that. The Stand-Alone option was supposed to give you the chance to specify a different installation location for the databases, such as a different partition or drive (it has to be local) and a different location for the index files. However, there is a flaw in the SharePoint installation process. On the Data Location tab, you can specify only where the index files will go, but you should also be able to specify where the database files should go. This is indicated by the Help file that is associated with the Data Location tab of the installation screen. However, as of the writing of this book, this option does not install the databases in the location you specify. It only puts the index files there. Really, this is the only difference between the Stand-Alone installation and Basic. Hopefully, soon, Microsoft will release a service pack that will fix this oversight, bringing the interface into alignment with the Help file’s content.
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Earlier you learned that the Advanced Installation option Server Type allows you to choose between a Stand-alone installation of SharePoint and a Web Front End or Server Farm installation, and that these advanced types of installation allow you to configure your feedback to Microsoft, and where the index files go. Specifying the location of the index files does make it easier to find and monitor them. To do that, follow these steps:
1. On the Server Type tab, select Web Front End. 2. Go to the Data Location tab. By default, the data location for the index files is under Program Files and buried deep beneath the Common Files folder. You can keep that default location, although you may want to make note of it, or you can specify a different location. You can enter the path to the new location, or you can browse to it.
3. In my example I’ve decided to specify a different location for the index files as a folder that I created on the server called indexfiles. To do this, I just click the Browse button, click the plus sign next to the Local Disk, select the indexfiles folder (see Figure 2.20), and click OK. The path c:\indexfiles will appear as the data location. You can use whatever folder is appropriate for you to do this; if you have a different local drive or partition, all the better. Simply enter the path to the location you’ve chosen, or browse to it.
Figure 2.20 The index files data location
4. Go to the Feedback tab, where you can select the option to sign up to give Microsoft anonymous reports of how SharePoint is working, select the first option on the Feedback tab. By default, it is set to I’ll Choose Later, so you do have the option to worry about it after
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SharePoint is up and running. This example isn’t going to be sending data back to Microsoft at this time, so I am going to keep the default.
5. If the settings of all tabs are as you’d like them (make certain that Web Front End is selected on the Server Type tab), click the Install Now button to continue. The installation will continue without any other input from you. When the installation completes, it will trigger the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard, which is the second part of this process.
6. If you want to wait and configure SharePoint later, you can deselect the Run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard now checkbox. When you click Close SharePoint, it will not continue configuring. For my example, keep the checkbox checked and click the Close button to trigger the configuration process.
Why wait? If you are installing SharePoint on several servers at one time (building the whole server farm at once), it is suggested that you install SharePoint on each of them first, then wait and configure each server one at a time. This allows the configuration database to acknowledge each server and their services systematically. This is why you can do the install and then delay the actual configuration of the server until some other time. The Configuration Wizard will start with a Welcome screen. As you can see in Figure 2.21, it requires the name of the database server (or server instance), database where the server farm configuration data will be stored, and a username and password for the database access account that will administer the server farm. Click Next.
Figure 2.21 The SharePoint Configuration Wizard Welcome screen
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7. A dialog box will appear and warn you that the Internet Information Services, SharePoint Administration Service, and SharePoint Timer Service services may need to be started or reset during the configuration process (see Figure 2.22). If this server is also currently serving web pages in IIS other than SharePoint, there may be momentary pause as the IIS service is restarted. To continue configuring SharePoint, click Yes in the dialog box.
Figure 2.22 The Reset Services Warning dialog box
8. The next screen asks if you’d like to connect to an existing server farm, or if you would like to create a new server farm (Figure 2.23). This server will be the first in the server farm, so select No, I Want to Create a New Server Farm. Click Next.
Figure 2.23 Connect to existing farm or create new one
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You should be on the Specify Configuration Database Settings at this point. As you can see, there is a field for the database server and a field for the database name. SharePoint has conveniently put the default name, SharePoint_Config, in the database name field for you. You can change it if you’d like but I am staying with the default in my example for clarity’s sake.
9. In my example, the SQL 2005 server is called RR1, so I will enter RR1 in the database server field, and keep SharePoint_Config as the database name. Enter the correct server name or instance in the database server field for your environment.
10. In the Specify Database Access Account section, you will choose the Windows account that SharePoint will use to connect to the configuration database. As a best practice, always use a domain name (if you are using Active Directory) and username. Also, and this is SharePoint thing, always use the domainname\username format. If you are going to be using SQL and SharePoint on the same server, and want to use a local account, you have to use the localmachinename\username format. As you can see in Figure 2.24, my example uses the domain user account created specifically for this purpose: dem0tek\wssconfig. Don’t forget to enter a password, of course.
Figure 2.24 Specify the database access account
11. After you’ve filled in the database server, database name, and database access account fields, click Next to continue.
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Make Certain the Setup Account Is Correctly Configured in SQL If your setup account was not set up properly in SQL, this screen is where you’ll find out. Unless SQL was prepared with preinstalled databases with the correct settings, your setup account must be able to create databases, add the database access account to the SQL Logins, DBCreators, and SecurityAdmins roles, and give it ownership of the Central Administration databases. After we finish the installation, I am going to go through the steps to check the settings on the SQL server. You may want to skip to that part to see if your settings match mine (the Confirming Database Access account settings section). If you forget to set the surface area of your SQL server to allow remote connections, that could also cause a problem. Make sure that has been done on the SQL server. If not, no matter how your account is set up, you will not be able to access the server to create databases.
12. The next screen allows you to configure the configuration database’s Central Administration site port number. The Basic installation assigned the port randomly for you. However, although this installation suggests a random port, it also allows you to choose a port number between 1024 and 65535. To be specific, you can choose any port between 1 and 65535, but many of the ports up to 1023 are taken by common protocols. Use a higher port if you can. As you can see in Figure 2.25, my example suggests 9220. The Configuration Wizard suggests truly random port numbers, so they are unlikely to be something your server is using for anything else.
Figure 2.25 The default port for Central Administration
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Verifying Port Number Usage Let’s say that you have an appropriate port number that might be easier to remember than the random one SharePoint chooses for you. Before you assign an alternate port number for your new Central Administration site, you may want to be absolutely certain that your server is not using that port for anything. The quick and easy way to confirm that is to use an often forgotten tool that comes with Windows Server 2003—PortQuery. The executable is . portqry.exe and you can find it on the Windows Server CD in the Support folder, in the support.cab file). If you have Internet access, use the newer version, portqryv2.exe, which is available as a download from Microsoft. This command-line tool is used to query the ports of a server to see if a port is being filtered (by a firewall usually), has a service listening to it (and therefore not available for assignment to anything else), or has nothing listening to it (and therefore is available for you to use). PortQuery is a tool primarily meant to troubleshoot services such as Active Directory and Exchange. However, in this case it will be used to see if the port I want to use for Central Administration is being used by some other service. To do this, I open a command prompt and navigate to the folder where I installed portqry (or portqryv2), which is usually on the local drive in the portqry or portqryv2 folder. Then I run the portqry command with the following switches: portqry -n IPaddressofserver -p both -e yourport This means that I am running the portqry executable, with the -n, or name switch (this is not optional and can use the machine name, FQDN, or IP address; otherwise, it defaults to 127.0.0.1), -p or protocol switch (I like to check for both TCP and UDP just in case), and the -e or endpoint switch, which is used to specify the port I’m checking. In this case, the IP address of my SharePoint server is 172.24.63.4, and the port I am going to check is 9876. As you can see, there are no services listening on port 9876 using TCP or UDP.
Port Query is an invaluable troubleshooting tool and definitely should be a standard in your server toolkit.
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If you use PortQuery frequently, or you have to teach junior administrators how to use it a little too often, you might want to consider the graphical user interface add-on called the PortQueryUI tool. It is simple to install. Download the PortQryUI.exe installer and double-click it. It will install the necessary files to a folder called PortQryUI on the local drive. Then simply navigate to the PortQryUI folder using Windows Explorer or the command prompt, and run the PortQueryUI.exe executable. The interface is easy to use, and it has convenient predefined queries for common services and a means to manually specify your ports. For easy access, you can create a shortcut to it on the Desktop, which is what I do. To use PortQueryUI to check if any services are listening to port 9876, just specify the port you want to check, make certain you are checking both TCP and UDP, and click Query. It will generate the same report that the command-line PortQuery tool did, but in an easy-to-use interface. Check out the predefined queries for hours of fun.
13. To make things easier, if you’ve checked the port availability on your server, you can ignore the default SharePoint suggests and specify the port you can remember more easily (I am going to use 9876) for the Central Administration site. To specify the port, check the Specify port number checkbox, which enables the port number field, where you can add the specific port number.
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By the way, if you want to change your Central Administration site port number, after this process is complete you will have to rerun the SharePoint configuration wizard, disable the Central Administration site, then re-enable the site to specify a new port. Just changing it in IIS will not let the configuration database for the farm know it has been changed.
14. The Configure Security Settings section of the Configure SharePoint Central Administration Web Application screen is where you can choose the authentication provider used with Windows Integrated Authentication. Kerberos is the most secure method, the one Microsoft suggests, and therefore the most difficult to set up. The default is NTLM, which is perfectly useable in an Intranet environment and the one that requires no additional setup (see Figure 2.26). For my example I’m going to use NTLM because it is the most likely choice for 95 percent of the networks out there.
Figure 2.26 Configure the SharePoint security settings
When More Information Is Not That Informative You might be curious about using Kerberos and, therefore, think it would be helpful to click the Show Me More Information link in the Configuration Security Settings area of the screen. It will take you to a help document that talks generally about the settings on the screen, with a link that apparently gives you more information specific to setting up Kerberos in SharePoint. The link takes you to general information about Kerberos and is, overall, not specifically helpful.
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To learn more about using Kerberos as your authentication method with SharePoint, go to KnowledgeBase article 832769. With SharePoint version 3.0 (or MOSS 2007 for that matter), you no longer have to run the script the document refers to initially, but you do have to complete the “Configure a service principal name for the domain user account” and “Configure trust for delegation for Web parts to access remote resources” sections. Enabling Kerberos is also covered in Chapter 15, “Advanced Installation and Configuration.”
15. If you are certain that all the settings are correct, note your port number and click Next. This will take you to a summary screen in the Configuration Wizard. It summarizes your settings (which is useful) and has an Advanced Settings button. The Advanced Settings button is used in this case to change the User Account Mode for the server farm. This screen also gives you the option to go back and fix any mistakes or typos. The Central Administration URL in Figure 2.27 is my servername and the port is 9876 (i.e., http://sp2:9876/). The Central Administration URL is what you will enter in your browser’s (preferably Internet Explorer 6 or higher) address bar to access Central Administration.
Figure 2.27 Configuration Settings summary
16. If all the settings listed in the configuration settings summary are correct (no typos), and you have completed all configuration steps to your satisfaction, continue installing SharePoint by clicking Next. SharePoint will be configured by stepping through 9 different tasks, including initializing, creating the configuration database (which may take a while), creating help collections, securing resources, registering SharePoint Services, registering features, provisioning the SharePoint central admin web app, installing application content files, and finalizing SharePoint configuration.
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Seriously Considering Active Directory Account Creation Mode? SharePoint does not do authentication on its own. It requires Windows, or some other authentication provider (such as forms based or single sign on for MOSS), to perform the authentication for the user account. SharePoint queries the provider about that user; then, if the provider approves it, the user is allowed to use SharePoint. Once the user logs in, then SharePoint can apply its permissions to secure that user’s access to its resources. Central Administration in particular must use Windows integrated authentication (although you can use other kinds for your web applications if you wish). But if SharePoint is running on a domain and using Windows Authentication, it can use Active Directory (AD) to store the user accounts that can be added to SharePoint. That’s called Domain Account mode, and is the standard user account mode for SharePoint. If that doesn’t work for you (maybe because the people who will contribute and manage SharePoint will be from outside the company), there is Active Directory Account Creation (ADAC) mode. This mode (as you may recall from Chapter 1) uses AD for authentication but in this case you specify an Organizational Unit (OU) for SharePoint to create AD user objects when a user is added to SharePoint. In other words, with Domain User Account mode, you have to have the user in AD, then you can add them as a user in SharePoint. With ADAC you add the user to SharePoint, then they are added as users in the OU you made for SharePoint in Active Directory. If you are using ADAC, only users created in the OU are available as users in SharePoint; you cannot add a user from elsewhere in AD that isn’t in that OU. The tricky thing about choosing a user account mode is that the Domain Account mode is the default mode. The explicit option to choose it is not available. It is simply assumed by SharePoint during installation without administrator intervention. Many may not even know that ADAC exists. As a matter of fact, if you do a Basic or Stand-Alone installation there is no way for you to choose your user account mode anyway. To enable Active Directory Account Creation mode for SharePoint, you must click the Advanced Settings button on the Configuration Settings Summary screen to get to the settings. It is so very easy to miss the settings for Active Directory Account Creation mode that I suspect Microsoft would like to encourage us not to use it. If you are going to enable ADAC for your user accounts, keep in mind a few things (and read Chapter 15, “Advanced Installation and Configuration” for more): ◆
You cannot upgrade a SharePoint server to MOSS if it is running in ADAC mode. MOSS doesn’t support it.
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You cannot change your mind. If you decide the setup is too hard and you would rather go back to the default Domain Account mode, you are out of luck. During a SharePoint installation, you choose one user account mode or the other, and that is it for the whole farm forever. The setting is unchangeably burned into the configuration database. You cannot change it without reinstalling. This is why the Basic install just goes for the default Domain Account mode automatically.
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You have to set the minimum password age to zero (which means never). If you set it to something else, users cannot change their own passwords. When a user is added to SharePoint with this user account mode, the user is sent their username and password. Because passwords are assigned to them, it is best practice to allow users to change them to something more personally private and relevant. They can’t do that if Active Directory is using a minimum password age of anything other than zero.
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◆
If you use ADAC mode, you must learn how to manage a lot of SharePoint administration using the command-line tool STSADM. (STSADM is a really powerful command; Chapter 13, “STSADM: A Look at the SharePoint Command-Line Tool,” is dedicated to it.) The HTML interface has features that depend on Domain Account mode. It won’t let you create site collections in the GUI, or allow users to create their own site collections (called Self-Service Site Creation). The potential inconvenience of this is enough to make administrators think twice about using ADAC mode.
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As you know, running any IIS Web Sites on a Domain Controller, let alone SharePoint, is not recommended. But specifically, ADAC mode is not supported on a Domain Controller.
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There are also some additional steps to setting up the ADAC user account mode, in addition to having an OU in Active Directory specifically for the SharePoint users, the database access account must be delegated the right to create/delete/manage user accounts and read all user account information in that OU.
17. When the configuration tasks are complete, the Configuration Successful screen will appear. This final screen of the Configuration Wizard lists the configuration settings that have been applied (notice there is no Back button in Figure 2.28). Write down these settings or print the screen to document them. You may know them by heart now, but how well will you remember them in a year? If your configuration was not successful, this screen will give you an idea of what went wrong so you can fix it and try again.
Figure 2.28 The configuration is successful
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Launching Central Administration When the configuration is complete, SharePoint is not quite installed; you still need to create an actual site. Before we move on, we first need to confirm everything is in order and working as expected. When you close the Configuration Wizard, Internet Explorer will automatically open and take you to Central Administration. This site naturally requires authentication, so you’ll need to log in. Perform the following:
1. As you know, Central Administration automatically has a few accounts that can log in and begin to administer SharePoint. They are the setup account (because it installed SharePoint), the local server’s built-in Administrators group, and the database access account. In my example, to be consistent, I am going to use my setup account to login, which is a domain account called setupacct. As you may have noticed, SharePoint prefers the domain\username format for accounts, so use that format to log in with your setup account (see Figure 2.29).
Figure 2.29 Log in to Central Administration
Who Administers SharePoint Matters When you log in to SharePoint using the setup account at this point, you are using an account that has both Farm Administrator rights to the farm by default (because it installed SharePoint), and it is allowed to do local administrative work on the local server. This allows it to make changes in IIS, such as adding Web Sites and changing security settings. It is a good idea to add at least one other account that is also a local administrator or domain admin of the SharePoint server/servers so they can configure all settings necessary in SharePoint. If you log into Central Administration with an account that is allowed to administer SharePoint as a Farm Administrator, but is not a local administrator, or a member of the Domain Admins group, then some of the settings for SharePoint will not be available. You will be unable to work with the services running on the server or create new web applications, for example.
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Figure 2.30 Prompt to add Central Administration to trusted sites
2. You may then be prompted to add the website to Trusted sites (Figure 2.30). Click Add, and use the Add dialog box to add the site to the Trusted Sites list. The Central Administration site will then come up in the browser. So far you’ve got the Central Administration site up and running (Figure 2.31). This means that you have the means to configure SharePoint settings and save them in the configuration database, which is good, but you’re not really done with the installation process yet. So before we really get into exploring the site, there are some changes to confirm. So let’s see what the installation actually did on the back end.
Figure 2.31 Central Administration
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Checking the SharePoint Databases As you know, SharePoint needs four databases. However, right now SharePoint is in limbo because it is not done being configured. It has created the configuration database and the Central Administration web application. This means that SharePoint currently has two databases. Those databases should have the setup account as the DBO (the original database owner) and the database access account as the database owner (assigned by the setup account during installation—it was basically handed off as soon as the setup account could add the database access account to SQL). On the SQL server, you need to check the following:
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For the existence of the new databases.
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If the database access account was added to SQL.
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If the database account has the correct security assigned for both databases.
Interface Differences Note that this book uses SQL 2005. Yours might be SQL 2000 SP3 or higher. If so, your interface might be slightly different than what is discussed in this chapter.
Access Denied? Even if you are not allowed to access the SQL server (because that is the role of your company’s DBA), the information provided in this section can help you understand what happened on the SQL server.
Confirming Database Creation To get started, follow these steps:
1. Go to the SQL server and access the SQL management console (in my example, that’s the SQL Server Management Studio) and connect to the server.
2. See if the two databases for the Central Administration site are there. To do that (make sure your Object Explorer is open), click the plus sign next to Databases. It should list the databases that are available on this server (see Figure 2.32). In my example, there are two new databases: SharePoint_AdminContent, with a long GUID alphanumeric string at the end of it, and SharePoint_Config, or whatever you named your configuration database during the SharePoint installation and configuration.
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Figure 2.32 The SharePoint databases in SQL Server 2005
Confirming Database Access Account Settings The next thing to do is check to see if the database access account has been added to SQL properly and if the databases have the correct security settings. Remember that the setup account was added to SQL prior to installation, but that it was supposed to add the database access account as a login to SQL.
1. To confirm this, see what accounts are listed under Logins for the server by clicking the plus sign next to Security in the Object Explorer, and then select the Logins node. Under the contents of that node, your database access account should be listed (wssconfig is shown in Figure 2.33).
Figure 2.33 The SQL logins
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2. To see if your database access account has the correct server roles, double-click its name in the Logins list. A Login properties window will open for that account.
3. Select Server Roles from the list on the left (see Figure 2.34). You should see in the details list of server roles that that account has DBCreator and SecurityAdmin privileges.
Figure 2.34 Login Properties Server Roles
4. Click OK or Cancel to close the Login properties window. Confirming Central Administration Database Settings Next we need to see if the Central Administration databases have the correct user settings, then select them and check their security.
1. To do this, start with the SharePoint_AdminContent database, select it in the Object Explorer, select Security, and then open the Users node (see Figure 2.35).
Figure 2.35 The AdminContent database’s Users node
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The setup account is not listed under Users; only the database access account is listed. That’s because, for the two Central Administration databases, the setup account is the DBO, or ultimate owner of the databases.
2. To prove this, double-click the DBO displayed in the Users list. In the properties window, you’ll see that the setup account is the login name for the DBO (Figure 2.36). Click Cancel to close the DBO User information.
Figure 2.36 The Setup account is the DBO of AdminContent
3. To see what roles the database access account holds for the AdminContent database, doubleclick the account name in the Users list. In the User Information window that opens, scroll down through the database role membership list. You’ll see that the account is a db_owner, so the database access account has ownership rights to the database (see Figure 2.37).
4. Click Cancel to close the window. 5. To check the role that the setup account and database access account hold for the SharePoint_Config database basically do what you did for the AdminContent database. Select the configuration database, SharePoint_Config in this case, in Object Explorer. Open the Security node, and then open the Users folder. Double-click dbo to verify that the setup account is the DBO for that database, and then close the window. Then to verify that the database access (server farm) account is a database owner of the SharePoint_Config database, double-click the database access account listing and scroll down the Role Members in the User window. It will display that the database access account is the db_owner of this database as well.
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Figure 2.37 The Database Access account is db_owner
Now you know the following: ◆
The configuration databases were created in SQL.
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The setup account created them.
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The database access account is allowed to log in, be a DBCreator and SecurityAdmin, and own the two databases created by the setup account.
After this, the setup account will have nothing to do with SharePoint really. All other databases will be created by the database access account, which will also govern the other service accounts’ access to those databases. There you go. That’s what SharePoint did in SQL. Now it’s time to see what SharePoint did in IIS.
Confirming the Changes to IIS On the SharePoint server, open IIS by choosing Start ➢ Administrative Tools ➢ Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager. We need to confirm that the application pool for the Central Administration web application (Web Site) is correct, that there is a Web Site for Central Administration and its application pool is correct, as well as confirm the port number for the site. To complete these tasks follow these steps:
1. To confirm the Central Administration application pool, select Application Pools in the tree pane on the left of the console.
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2. In the action pane, there should be two application pools (see Figure 2.38): one is the default that loads when IIS is installed, and the other should be SharePoint Central Administration v3 (if this server is hosting other websites in your environment, there may be more).
Figure 2.38 Application pools after the SharePoint Server Farm installation
3. Right-click the SharePoint Central Administration v3 application pool, and select Properties from the popup menu.
4. In the Properties dialog box, go to the Identity tab. On that tab, the Application Pool Identity should be the one you assigned during the SharePoint Configuration Wizard (my example is dem0tek\wssconfig, as you can see in Figure 2.39).
Figure 2.39 SharePoint Central Administration’s Application Pool Identity
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5. Click Cancel to close the Properties dialog box. 6. To confirm that the Central Administration site has the correct port and application pool, select Web Sites in the tree pane of the console. In the action pane, you’ll see that the SharePoint Central Administration v3 site is listed, as well as the Default Web Site. (See Figure 2.40 for an example.)
Figure 2.40 Central Administration Web Site
7. Right-click SharePoint Central Administration v3, and select Properties. In the Properties dialog box for the Web Site (Figure 2.41), the TCP port is the one assigned during SharePoint configuration. My example is 9876.
Figure 2.41 Central Administration Web Site properties
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8. Click the Home Directory tab and go to the bottom of that dialog box to see that the application pool listed for this Web Site is the SharePoint Central Administration v3 pool (Figure 2.42).
Figure 2.42 Central Administration’s application pool
9. Click Cancel to close the Properties dialog box. Since we are done checking IIS for the moment, you can close the console as well.
Confirming SharePoint Services and Local Security Groups SharePoint adds services to the server in order to function. It’s good to know what services are running and what they do so you can better troubleshoot SharePoint should something go awry.
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Which is why it is time to check the SharePoint Services. Keep in mind that they are not all on yet because the Search service has not been enabled. To check the services, open the Services console by choosing Start ➢ Administrative Tools ➢ Services. In the console, scroll down through the services to the Ws. The SharePoint Services will be listed: Windows SharePoint Services Administration Point and runs in the local system context.
Performs local administrative tasks for Share-
Windows SharePoint Services Search Provides search services, is currently disabled (because we haven’t configured it yet), and although it says it is a local service now, it will be using the account you assign it when it is configured because it has to be able to access the SQL server on the domain. ¨ Windows SharePoint Services Timer The uber service that manages all tasks that require timing, including workflows, alerts, usage analysis, and more. This service runs in the context of the database access account (dem0tek\wssconfig in Figure 2.43).
Figure2.43 The Time Service account context
Windows SharePoint Services Tracing local service.
Manages SharePoint trace logs locally and runs as a
Windows SharePoint Services VSS Writer Assists in backup and restore and integrates with volume shadow copy. It runs in a local system context.
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In addition to installing services, SharePoint also creates three local security groups: WSS_WPG Members get read access to local SharePoint resources. Usually contains the service accounts that require access to content databases and the search service account. WSS_Admin_WPG Members have write access to the local SharePoint resources. This group must have access to the log file location so SharePoint can write to them. If you move the log files, be certain this group has read and write access. By default, built-in administrators, the setup account and the server farm account are members. Any account you add to Central Administration as a Farm administrator will be a member. WSS_Restricted_WPG The only member of this group by default is the server farm account. This group is required for the WSS Administration Service to function. To view these groups, go to Start ➢ Administrative Tools ➢ Computer Management. In the console, select Users and Groups under System Tools, then select Groups (Figure 2.44). To check their membership, simply double click them. It is not recommended that you add users to these groups manually. It is best to leave these to SharePoint. Before we move on to the initial configuration tasks to finish installing SharePoint in a server farm, we should check the index files and make certain that they were installed in the location we specified during installation.
Figure2.44 SharePoint local groups
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DCOM Error Silliness After I install SharePoint, I occasionally get a DCOM error in the system event log. This is very likely because SharePoint forgot to give the database access account Local Activation rights to the IIS WAMREG admin Service DCOM application.
To fix it, follow these steps: 1. Note the CLSID of the offending DCOM application and open the Component Services console by choosing Start ➢ Administrative Tools ➢ Component Services. 2. In the console, make sure Component Services is selected in the tree pane, and then open the Computers folder in the action pane. 3. Open My Computer in the action pane, and then open the DCOM Config folder. 4. To confirm that the error is referring to the IIS WAMREG admin service (although that has always been the culprit for me), change the view of the action pane to Detailed, and scroll through the DCOM applications until you find the CLSID that matches the one you noted earlier. (You must scroll because there is unfortunately no “Find” tool in Component Services.) In my case, it was the IIS WAMREG Admin Service.
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5. To give the database access account Local Activation rights to this DCOM, right-click the DCOM application and select Properties in the popup menu. 6. In the Properties dialog box, go to the Security tab. In the Launch and Activation Permissions section, select Customize and click Edit.
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7. In the Launch Permission dialog box, you need to add the database access account and then give it local launch and activation permissions. Click Add, enter the name of your database access account in the dialog box, and click OK. The account should be added to the Group or Usernames in the Launch Permission dialog box.
8. With that account selected, allow the Local Launch (if it isn’t allowed already) and Local Activation permissions, then click OK. 9. Click OK in the Properties dialog box for the DCOM application.
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10. To make absolutely certain that the application updates correctly, refresh all components by rightclicking the My Computer icon in the tree pane, and selecting Refresh all components in the popup menu. Then close the Component Services console. This should end your DCOM error about the database access account not having local launch and activation permissions. You may also need to add the content database account for each of your SharePoint web applications to the DCOM to the list of those allowed to launch the DCOM application and activate it locally.
Checking the Index Files During the installation, we specified where the index files would go. Under normal circumstances, you would want them on a different drive than your system files for optimum performance and space, but in my example I chose to store the index files in a folder called, creatively enough, indexfiles on the local drive. To see what those files look like, navigate in Windows Explorer to the location you specified for them (my index files are in the indexfiles folder in the C: drive). Inside that folder created for the index files SharePoint has created a Config folder and filled it with many text files, most of which start with the word noise (see Figure 2.45). They hold records of all the noise words, like “the” or “a”, that SharePoint knows. It uses the records to compare against words it finds and the XML files of the indexed words themselves. The files are apparently organized by language, except jpn seems to be English words.
Figure 2.45 The Indexfiles folder contents
This folder and its files can be tracked to see how large they get and even what changes are made. Keep in mind that those configuration index files were added during installation, regardless of whether or not this server is going to actually be running a search. When search is configured, an Application folder will be added to hold the files needed to index SharePoint content.
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Now there are no mysteries about what SharePoint has created, what it needs, and how it installs. All that is left is to finish configuring it and then you’ll be ready to roll.
PSCONFIG, the Wizard Behind the Curtain Now that you’ve seen how the installation and configuration wizard works, I’ll let you in on a secret: all it is doing is using a command called PSCONFIG at the command line. Behind that nice, appealing interface, PSCONFIG is hard at work doing the installation. What does that mean to you? It means that you can use that command too. And because it is a command, you can script it to automate installations. You may have noticed that the installation had two parts: the installation of the necessary files, or binaries as they are called, for SharePoint (using your standard setup.exe), and then the configuration of SharePoint (which is done with psconfig.exe). If you wanted to install SharePoint with the PSCONFIG command line tool, then don’t complete the configuration of SharePoint after the file installation. Clear the “Run the SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard” box when that screen comes up, and click Close. This means the files you need to configure SharePoint and truly install it are in place, and now all you have to do is complete the process. SharePoint puts its command line tools in the %Program Files%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\bin folder on the local server. To use the PSCONFIG command, open a command prompt (Start ➢ Run, type cmd, click OK), and navigate to that bin folder. To see what PSCONFIG can do, type psconfig/? at the command prompt. It will offer you three command options: -cmd [parameter] This command indicates that PSCONFIG should run as a command based on the specified parameter. Parameters can be further modified by additional options. -help [parameter] This lets you get help information about a particular parameter and how to use it. -? This is the equivalent of using/? after the command and simply displays the syntax and parameters used with the command. The parameters that can be used for PSCONFIG are: ◆
Setup: This parameter literally just runs the SharePoint setup. You can use the LCID option (to specify language) with this parameter. Keep in mind that Setup.exe is an executable in its own right, and can run on its own with its own options. For example, to repair an installation, you would run Setup/repair at the command line first, then PSCONFIG’s setup. Setup.exe is what is used to install the SharePoint binaries.
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Standaloneconfig: Installs SharePoint as a Stand-alone server, with the Windows Internal Database. This also uses the LCID option.
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◆
Configdb: Is used to specify the configuration database for the installation, with additional parameters to specify whether it should create a database, connect to an existing database, or disconnect. With this parameter you can specify the domain for the farm, its organizational unit (if it will be using Directory Management Service), and even specify the database for the Central Administration site. This parameter is used if you are doing a command line installation of a SharePoint server that will be part of an existing server farm.
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Helpcollections: Installs the SharePoint help file collections.
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Secureresources: Is supposed to enforce security on the SharePoint resources, like files, folders, and registry keys.
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Services: This parameter is used to register SharePoint services and has two additional modifiers: install, which registers the SharePoint services on the local server, and provision, which installs, and registers the SharePoint services for a Stand-alone server, setting them as online.
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Installfeatures: Although the command line tool STSADM can also do work with SharePoint features, this parameter is used to register the SharePoint features for the server farms that are on the local server.
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Adminvs: This parameter is used to create a new Central Administration web application, and has additional options to specify the port and type of authentication. This parameter also has the option to unprovision, or remove a Central Administration web application.
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Evalprovision:DoesaBasicSharePointinstallation.IntendedtoinstallSharePointconveniently for evaluation, it has three options: provision, which simply installs SharePoint; port, which allows you to specify the port used by the default SharePoint web application (if not specified, 80 will be used); and overwrite, which will overwrite an existing IIS Web Site with the new web application. Normally, if you specify a port that is already in use by SharePoint, it will be shut down and SharePoint will create its own Web Site without disturbing the first one. With overwrite enabled, it will replace the existing web application.
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Applicationcontent: This parameter copies the web application binaries, files, and other shared application data for SharePoint to the web applications. This is good if you feel those files have been removed or corrupted.
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Quiet: A standard installation parameter, it will run the configuration wizard steps without output. The data is written to a psconfig.exe[date].log file.
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Upgrade: This parameter is what SharePoint uses to upgrade (or migrate) existing WSS 2.0 installations. This parameter has the option to do side by side or in-place upgrades. It has an option, reghostonupgrade, which reverts customized pages to the WSS defaults. Other parameters, such as force, wait, and finalize, are used to control the upgrade process. For more on upgrading SharePoint, see Chapter 14, “Migrating from WSS 2.0 to WSS 3.0.”
The syntax for using PSCONFIG is: psconfig.exe -cmd [parameter] -parameteroption An example of this is: psconfig.exe -cmd setup -lcid <1033>. If you are going to use PSCONFIG to automate the installation of servers in your server farm, make certain that the installation of binaries (the initial installation step before configuration) has been run on each server to install the necessary files PSCONFIG requires locally. You can string parameters together to
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have one long command, but keep in mind that they execute in a certain order. The order I have them above is the order they run, with upgrade going last. So keep that in mind. So for those of you who don’t like the graphic user interface, or were wondering how to automate your SharePoint installation, explore PSCONFIG; it might be what you’ve been looking for.
Finalizing the Server Farm Installation When you install SharePoint using the Advanced Web Front-End option (or Server Farm in common parlance), the files required for installation are copied to the server and initialized. Then the Configuration Wizard kicks off to set up the configuration database, sets the database access account, chooses the port number and authentication method, and applies the user account mode (by default or not). Then the Configuration Database is created; all of those settings are recorded within it, and then the Central Administration site and its content database are created. Finally, when the Configuration Wizard finishes successfully, the Central Administration site is accessed through the web browser. SharePoint moves from the Configuration Wizard to the Central Administration sites because, with the Advanced Server Farm installation, you explicitly have to create the web application (i.e., the Web Site in IIS) and first site collection for SharePoint. It won’t do that for you because you might want a specific name or header for your first web application or site collection, you might want to specify an SQL server for the content database, or you might want to do network load balancing and need to specify your network load balance IP address. Unlike the Basic Installation, which creates the SharePoint web application and site collection by default just after it sets up the configuration database, and Central Administration, Advanced Web Front End only sets up SharePoint to the first SharePoint web application and site collection (Central Administration) and then stops, waiting for you to go the rest of the way. That’s why we are not done configuring SharePoint for this Advanced install. As you can well imagine, any SharePoint server, regardless of what installation option you choose, is going to require configuration to “make it your own.” Because many of the initial configuration tasks are the same, single server or server farm, they will be discussed at the end of the chapter, independent of installation concerns. And this is why we are going to do only two configuration tasks in this section: ◆
Enable the Search service (and apply the correct service accounts)
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Create the SharePoint web application (and check to see what that does) and the first SharePoint site collection
This will make search possible on all subsequent web applications on the Farm, and it will make it possible for you to use SharePoint to do more than administration. To perform the necessary configuration steps to get this installation up to the point that the Basic Installation ends, you’ll need to use Central Administration. You should have Central Administration up, but if you don’t, open Internet Explorer to navigate to http://yourservername:port (where the port number is the one you assigned to Central Administration during installation). You can also use the shortcut to the site on the Administrative Tools menu: select Start ➢ Administrative Tools ➢ SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration. Either option will take you to the Central Administration site if you closed it during the previous sections. Log in using the setup account.
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Figure 2.46 The Central Administration interface
Now, with Central Administration open, let’s take a quick look at the interface (Figure 2.46). Near the top left of the page is the wrench and hammer icon for Central Administration (a carry-over from earlier versions of SharePoint) and the title of the site, Central Administration. Below that are three tabs that are a navigation mechanism to get to the three pages of Central Administration: Home (which is where we are), Operations, and Application Management. Below the tabs, on the left, is the new and improved Quick Launch bar, another navigation feature. This bar is organized to let you quickly get to the Operations and Applications Management pages—and the Recycle Bin in case you delete something by mistake. You can also view all site content from the top link in the Quick Launch bar—which is useful if you’ve built a list or library and forgotten to add it to the Quick Launch bar. In the middle of the page, the convenient web parts summarize Administrator Tasks, display Farm Topology (which shows what servers are running what SharePoint-specific service), and offers a way to display links to resources that you might like to add to the home page of the Central Administration site (such as KnowledgeBase articles). We will be using the Administrator Tasks list in just a moment. The top right of the page offers the Welcome menu, which indicates who you are logged in as (a very useful feature for anyone who does a lot of testing and uses multiple accounts). You can use it to log off, log in as a different person, or modify your user information. Next to that, on the right is the ubiquitous Help button. Just below that is the Site Actions tab. When it is selected, a menu drops down to allow you to edit the web parts that are on the page, create a new page for the site if necessary, and more particularly, manage the site’s settings.
Ever Wonder about Help? Where are the document files for help? How many there are? How to delete them (just kidding)? Usually, Help files are essentially independent of the product to which they apply; they are a separate set of files usually combined into a .chm file. But this is not so in the case of SharePoint version 3.0.
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For this version of SharePoint they are now contained in a document library called HelpFold on the Central Administration site. You should be very careful about the permissions and rights applied to this folder so no one accidentally deletes it. The HelpFold library is an interesting example of a library that contains hundreds of files of different types. As a matter of fact, it is so large that it triggers a notice on the Settings page about learning how to manage large libraries.
The HelpFold library is, obviously, not listed on the Quick Launch bar on the Central Administration site. To get to it, use the View All Site Content link at the top of the Quick Launch bar. In the All Site Content page, you’ll see the HelpFold document library.
If you open it by simply clicking the HelpFold link, you’ll see that Microsoft has decided to organize the Help files by folder. Don’t be surprised if the folders are several layers deep. To look inside a folder,
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click on the folder name (for example, Content). If you selected Content, you’ll see that it is further organized based on the language the Help files are in; mine is 1033.
If you click the folder name (1033), two more folders will open; they are MS_WSS (standard Help files for SharePoint) and MS_WSS_ADMIN (the Help files specific to Central Administration and administration in general). If you click on one of those folder names, you will end up on a page listing many files. The page has a navigation component just above the list items that indicates that it is showing 1 to 100 items. Click the right arrow.
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Now you can see items 101 to 200. If you keep going, it stops at around 266 for MS_WSS. That’s right, there are 266 Help documents for WSS—not to mention those metadata files, the images files, and more. Keep this list safe. Chances are that you, or some other SharePoint administrator, will need these files later. Now that you are a little more familiar with the interface, let’s focus on some post-installation, initial-configuration tasks. We are going to finish configuring SharePoint and then stop and confirm the changes the configuration wrought—such as enabling Search, creating a web application, and creating a site collection. Before we begin, let’s check out the Administrator’s Task list on the Central Administration home page. Although my example strays from it a little, it is useful to remind you of critical administration that you may have overlooked. The list is organized, generally, by what Microsoft feels is a priority. These listed items are active, and they can change depending on what you enable, disable, or add to SharePoint. You will be using it on and off during these initial tasks because they help you find important configuration settings before you are completely familiar with the Central Administration layout.
The Read First Task The most important task in the Administrator’s task list is the Read First task, which gives you access to the Quick Start Guide. The Quick Start Guide mentions some things that really must be configured before you start using SharePoint that are not on the Administrator Tasks list for some reason. I am going to be doing most of the necessary tasks listed, except Alternate Access Mapping, which I will cover later. Regardless, you should know your resources, and the Quick Start Guide is a good resource. To open the Read First task to get the deployment instructions, just move your mouse over that task’s title until it highlights and click.
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On the Read First task page, you’ll notice the Title, Action, and Description sections. As you can see in the description, there are additional tasks that need to be performed. If you click the Read The Quick Start Guide link in the Action area, you will be taken to the Quick Start Guide and shown what those tasks are. The Quick Start Guide is organized, not surprisingly, by how you install SharePoint. Because we are doing a server farm installation, choose the “Learn how to deploy Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 in a server farm environment” link to learn about the settings necessary for your SharePoint server.
There you will see that you should always start your search service before you create the SharePoint web application that it will be searching. This is why, despite it not being on the Task list, I am going to have you do that next.
Configuring Search The first administrative task that you must perform, regardless of what the Administrator’s Task list says, is enable Search, because Search should be configured before you create a SharePoint site. If you are going to do any searching in SharePoint, there must be at least one server in the farm that is running the Search service. If your farm gets larger, you can enable Search on a different server later.
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Figure 2.47 The Services on the Server page
To enable Search, go to the Farm Topology list on the home page of the Central Administration site, and click on the server name for your SharePoint server (my example is SP2). This will bring you to the Services on Server page. To be specific, you are configuring the SharePoint server, which falls under the heading of Operations among the SharePoint administration tasks. This is why the breadcrumb above the title of the page (see Figure 2.47) leads back from this page to Operations and then back to the Central Administration home page. On this page, you can see the Services running on this server and, most particularly, that the Search service is stopped because it has not been configured. Note that it is required for the server farm. To configure and start the service, click Start in the same row as the Windows SharePoint Services Search in the Service table.
No Worries You might notice the red warning text at the top of the Search service configuration page. Unless you are using SSL on this website, all data you are sending to the server is unencrypted except the NTLM or Kerberos managed login information. The fact that this data includes account names and passwords being passed to the configuration database is what causes concern here. If this is an issue within your company, consider using SSL to secure the Central Administration web application. You shouldn’t be configuring your SharePoint servers from the Internet (which is where SSL really is important), but using SSL will protect the data that goes between the client and the web server. Currently, I am configuring SharePoint on the SharePoint server, and even though the information is not encrypted, I should still be okay.
In the Configure Windows SharePoint Services Search Service Settings page, you’ll see Service Account, Content Access Account, Search Database, and Indexing Schedule sections (see Figure 2.48).
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Figure 2.48 Configure the Search Service settings
Proceed with these steps:
1. In the Service Account section, use the service account you created to do search queries and access the search database. My example uses the dem0tek\wsssearch account for this very reason. This account is just a domain user; SharePoint (or more particularly the database access account) will give it the correct permissions to do its job.
2. For the Content Access Account, the account that will be reading all content for the site collections that will be searched, I am going to use dem0tek\wssindex.
3. The Search Database section should have filled in my SQL server name and created a default name for the search database, WSS_Search_SP2. It also defaults to Windows Authentication, which is the default authentication scheme on my SQL server. I am going to keep all of the defaults. If your SQL server uses SQL authentication, select that option and enter the required user name and password.
4. In the Index Schedule section, you can set the schedule that indexing must follow. The default is every five minutes, which is really convenient. However, indexing does take up valuable server resources, not to mention fills the Application log in Event Viewer with entries every five minutes, so you might want to schedule it either during a certain amount of time every hour, or even only during certain hours (supposedly during the off hours) of the day. I, however, am not going to be stressing the server unduly if I choose to have SharePoint index my sites every five minutes. And it is nice to be able to search for something very soon after it was posted to SharePoint. So we can keep the setting at the five minute interval in this case.
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When you have finished configuring Search, and are certain that all your data is correct, click OK. You might get an Operation in Progress page if it takes a moment to enable the service, create the search database and add the Search service’s accounts to it. That should bring the Services On Server page back up, and now the Windows SharePoint Services Search service should be started (see Figure 2.49).
Figure 2.49 The Search service is started
Still Not Starting? If the service still shows up as stopped, you may have clicked on the Search service name as opposed to the Start link. Doing that would configure Search, but not really start it. To start it, click Start in the Action column for the Search service, enter the password for both service accounts, and click OK again. That should properly start the service.
Now that you have enabled Search, when you create the SharePoint web application, its sites will be searchable. If you were to go to the SQL server and check the server’s databases, you would find a new search database (see WSS_Search_SP2 in Figure 2.50). If you check that database’s users, the DBO will be the database access account, and whatever you specified as the content access and Search Service accounts will also have ownership rights to the database, as you can see in the database DB_Owner Role Properties window in Figure 2.51.
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Figure 2.50 The new Search database
Figure 2.51 Search the database owners
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If you were to check the Services console, and scroll to the Windows SharePoint Services Search service, you would see that it is enabled and now uses the Search Service account. Now that Search has been enabled, you can move on to creating the web application and site collection that will contain the content to be indexed and searched.
Creating SharePoint’s First Web Application To create a SharePoint site, you must first create a web application (IIS Web Site) to put it in. Remember, web applications contain collections of sites. They are the boundary for security, the port number, the header address, and other IIS-specified settings. Web applications control a lot of the settings that are critical to the site collections and sites users will be working in. In order to create a web application on a SharePoint server, the account doing so must be Farm Administrator and must have the right to add Web Sites to IIS, meaning it should be a local administrator of the server (or a domain admin). To create a SharePoint web application, follow these steps:
1. Click on the Home tab at the top-left of the page to go back to the Central Administration home page and use the Administrator Tasks list.
2. On the home page, select the Create SharePoint Sites task in the Administrator Tasks web part.
Creating a Site or a Web Page It may seem misleading that you selected Create SharePoint Sites as a task to create a web application, but here’s the deal. Remember that web applications contain sites. You can’t actually create a site unless there is a web application in which to put it. The task is referred to as “creating a site” because goal-oriented people, or people trying to access their SharePoint site after installation, are going to be looking around for a way to create that site, regardless of the steps preceding the goal. Therefore, the task refers to creating a site, when at first it is going to take you to the Create New Web Application page.
3. On the Task page, take a look at the description of the task (Figure 2.52). To conveniently create a new web application, click Create new Web Application in the Action section of the task. Creating a new web application is the first step toward creating a site, because the site first has to have a web application to contain it. You can’t use Central Administration’s web application because it must be dedicated to configuration. This will take you to the Create New Web Application page. As you can see in the breadcrumb above the page title, this is normally accessed by selecting Application Management ➢ Create or Extend Web applications ➢ Create New Web Application.
4. In the Create New Web Application page (Figure 2.53) you’ll find the following sections: IIS Web Site, Security Configuration, Load Balanced URL, Application Pool, Reset Internet Information Services, Database Name and Authentication, and Search Server. As you can imagine, there will be a lot of settings.
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Figure 2.52 Create a new site task
Figure 2.53 Create a new web application
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We’re going to go through each setting, one at a time, until the new SharePoint web application is ready to be created. At the end of the list I will recap what settings were used for your convenience. IIS Web Site To start, you need to set up the IIS Web Site. The settings interact with IIS to create an IIS Web Site with the settings available in this interface. If necessary, you can go to IIS directly once the web application is set up to check. Use An Existing Site You could create a website in IIS and then use it for a SharePoint web application in SharePoint. That’s basically doing a run around on SharePoint, not letting it create one for you, but using one you built yourself. If you do select an existing IIS Web Site to use as a SharePoint web application, SharePoint won’t be aware of it, so you must create it manually on every SharePoint server in the farm so its contents will be replicated properly for load balancing. I really don’t suggest you do that. Create A New IIS Web Site The second option is the safest and what we are going to use for this example. It lets SharePoint create a new IIS Web Site. Its default description (which will be the IIS Web Site description as well) is SharePoint - 80. You can change the default if you’d like. The thing about creating a new web application using Central Administration is it will be noted in the configuration database and replicated to all other SharePoint servers on the farm. Port It goes without saying that it is easier to allow users to access SharePoint by just typing in the server name, and not specify a port number (such as http://servername:1234). But if you require it, you can use that familiar server name and specify a particular port number for people to access the site. Host Header If you’d like this web application to use port 80, but go by a name other than the default servername, feel free to create a host header. (For more information about host headers, check IIS’s Help files or read Chapter 8, “Site Collections and Web Applications”.) A host header will let IIS redirect user requests to the correct web application while still using port 80. For my example, this is the only web application on the server on port 80, so there is no need to supply a host header at this time. However, if you need to add another web application to this server, you can use a host header to differentiate traffic between the two web applications if they are using the same port. This option is obviously easier for the users because they do not have to memorize a port number. Path The virtual directory path can be set if you don’t want the default. This directory is used by IIS to store the files necessary to display web pages. By default, virtual directories are stored on the local drive under inetpub\wwwroot. However, if you want to specify some other path, feel free to do so. My example doesn’t. Leave the default settings for the IIS Web Site section as they are for this example. Security Configuration
You’ll see the following options:
Authentication Provider Here you can choose what kind of authentication method to use. Your options are Kerberos or NTLM. The default is NTLM. Each web application can have its own security configuration, regardless of the authentication method chosen for the server farm during the configuration phase of installation. The method chosen then really only strictly
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applies to Central Administration, and explains why anonymous wasn’t an option. When you create a new web application, you can apply different authentication provider requirements. If you want to use Kerberos authentication instead of NTLM, the application pool for this web application will have to be configured for Kerberos, meaning set up with a service provider name and potentially configure trust for delegation for both the SharePoint server and the content database’s service account (see Microsoft’s KnowledgeBase article 832769 for details or visit Chapter 15, “Advanced Installation and Configuration”). Allow Anonymous This setting will enable IIS to allow guest access to the web application if necessary (or disable it, depending on whether you choose Yes or No). Once this is enabled on a web application, it can be selectively applied to the site collections, sites, lists, and libraries. My example does not enable anonymous for this web application. Use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) SSL encrypts data transferred between a server and client, and it requires that the server have an SSL certificate. Enabling this option is a two-step process. First, you enable it in SharePoint by selecting Yes, and then you go into IIS and add the certificate there. Be aware that this web application will be inaccessible until the certificate is added to the IIS server. There are many articles and resources online concerning SSL. To learn how to add SSL certificates to IIS, consult IIS help or see Chapter 15, “Advanced Installation and Configuration.” The default for this setting is No, which is fine for this example.
Every Web Application for Itself Each web application can have its own authentication provider and method, allow (or not allow) anonymous, and enable SSL. Part of the reason for this is that authentication provision and SSL are actually the bailiwick of IIS, and SharePoint just uses what’s available for IIS Web Sites to manage itself. The fact that a web application is a security boundary is a good thing to keep in mind when designing for SharePoint. There may be valid reasons to allow anonymous access to certain site collections, while absolutely forbidding the option for others. This is good reason to create two different web applications to separate secure content for authenticated users from content that could be set to be accessed by anonymous users and/or authenticated users. In addition, you might have content that must be secured on the wire between the client and the SharePoint server, so you want those sites to be protected by an SSL certificate.
Load Balanced URL If you anticipate a heavy user load on your SharePoint servers, you may be planning to utilize network load balancing between your web front end servers. SharePoint supports NLB to some degree by replicating all web applications between servers in a server farm, using alternate access mapping and a load-balanced URL. When you use load balancing, one URL is used to point to a web application. The loadbalancing software or device will manage access to this web application, spreading the load between the balancing front-end servers. In a server farm, the SharePoint servers are the spitting image of each other (well, in relation to IIS and SharePoint related files, not physically identical) and are specifically set up for load balancing. If one server is too busy responding to client requests, the load balancer will redirect that address to the next server in line to take the request.
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Figure 2.54 Load Balanced URL, Application Pool, and Reset IIS sections
By default, this setting is the default URL or host header specified in the IIS Web Site section (as you can see in Figure 2.54). For this example we are working with just one server in the server farm, so load balancing will not really be an issue at this point. For more about load balancing, see Chapter 15, “Advanced Installation and Configuration.” Application Pool This section defines the service account that will be used to access this web application’s content database. Use Existing Application Pool You can use an existing IIS application pool. However, best practice is to specify a domain account especially for the web application. Although using an existing application pool is an option, it is not selected by default. Create New Application Pool This setting is selected by default, and it has a default application pool name: SharePoint-80. You can keep the default name or change it if you wish. For this example, the default is fine.
Security Account Reminder The application pool for this web application is going to read and write data to the content database for the sites contained there. It will be using the account that will access and store all your list content and document libraries files. This application pool security account is important for that reason. It should not be an account used for any other task if at all possible.
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Select A Security Account For This Application Pool fined and Configurable.
This setting has two options: Prede-
Predefined means that you can use a built-in account, such as local service or network service, which is not recommended. Configurable means you need to configure a unique account specifically for this application pool. Make sure that Configurable is selected. Enter a username using the domain\username format in the User Name field, and enter the account’s password in the Password field. My example uses the Content Database account that was created earlier: dem0tek\ wsscontent.
Reset Internet Information Services Creating a new website in IIS requires an IIS reset. In a server farm scenario, that means that each and every SharePoint server’s IIS must be reset to replicate the new web application to each one. This is where you can give permission to restart all the other SharePoint servers’ IIS automatically or not. Regardless, IIS will have to be reset manually on the local server. This is why there are two options: Restart IIS Automatically and Restart IIS Manually. If you choose to Restart IIS Manually, which is the default (just to be cautious, you may not want to restart IIS on all of your SharePoint servers simultaneously), you will need to go to each SharePoint server and run iisreset/noforce at the command prompt. This will reset IIS and pull the web application changes from the originating server. Because this example has only one server, we are going to have to reset manually regardless, so leave the default Restart IIS Manually selected. Database Name and Authentication This section allows you to specify the database server and database name for the web application (Figure 2.55). Database Server Enter the name of the SQL server that will hold the content database for this web application here. It should already contain the name of the SQL server (or server instance) you used for the configuration database. In my example, it is RR1, which is correct. Database Name This is the field for the database name for this web application. The default is WSS_Content. That is fine for this example. If there is already a WSS_Content database on the SQL server, this option will have a long GUID appended to it to insure it is unique. Database Authentication The options here are to use either Windows Authentication or SQL Authentication. The default is Windows Authentication. Because this SQL server is set up for Windows Authentication, that setting is perfect for my example. However, if your SQL server is set for SQL Authentication, you will need to use the SQL account and password. Search Server The final section contains a field in which you specify the server that is running the Windows SharePoint Services Search service. In a large SharePoint server farm, more than one server can do search queries to spread the load. In this example, there is only one. Therefore, in the dropdown list, the local server’s name (my example is SP2) is the only server on the list. If it isn’t selected, select it so Search will be able to index the web application’s content database.
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Figure 2.55 Database Name And Authentication, and Search Server sections
Here’s a recap for this example of how to create a new web application:
1. In the IIS Web Site section, perform the following: a. Select Create a new IIS Web Site. b. Either leave the default description or create one. c. Leave the port at 80. d. Leave the Host Header blank. e. Keep the default path.
2. In the Security Configuration section, perform the following: a. Leave the Authentication Provider at NTLM. b. Do not Allow Anonymous. c. Do not use Secure Sockets Layer (SSL).
3. In the Load Balanced URL section, leave the default URL as listed. 4. In the Application Pool section, perform the following: a. Select Create new application pool. b. Select Configurable. c. Enter the username and password of the Content Database Service account you created. My example uses dem0tek\wsscontent.
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5. In the Reset Internet Information Services section, leave Restart IIS Manually selected. 6. In the Database Name And Authentication section, perform the following: a. Make sure the Database Server field contains the name of your SQL server—and the instance if required. b. Leave the default database name or change it if you wish. c. Leave Windows Authentication selected as your database authentication. If your SQL server only does SQL authentication, then enter the account name and password for it in the appropriate fields.
7. In the Search Server section, choose the server running the Search service on your server farm. Because this is the only server on the server farm, select the local server’s name in the dropdown list.
8. If all of your settings are correct, click OK at the bottom of the page to create the SharePoint web application. The Operation In Progress page will appear while it accesses IIS, creates the IIS Web Site, creates the content database, assigns the content database account to the database, configures the settings, creates the virtual directory for the IIS Web Site, and populates it with the SharePoint site’s necessary files.
9. The Application Created page will appear in the browser (see Figure 2.56). To finish creating the new web application, you will need to reset IIS. To do this, open a command prompt by choosing Start ➢ Command Prompt (or Start ➢ Run, and enter cmd).
Figure 2.56 The Application Created page
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10. At the command prompt, enter iisreset/noforce and press Enter. The IIS service will attempt to stop, and then attempt to restart, and then restart successfully.
Confirming Web Application Creation To confirm that the new web application was created in IIS, open the IIS Manager console, click the plus sign next to the local computer, and click the plus sign next to Web Sites in the tree pane. Notice in Figure 2.57 that the default website has been stopped because it was using port 80 and our new web application needed that port. It kindly stopped the default website in case there was something there that you might need before it created the SharePoint web application, rather than just writing over it. Select SharePoint-80 (or whatever you used as the description when you created your new web application). The files necessary for the SharePoint web application are listed in the action pane. When you are finished confirming the new SharePoint web application, close IIS. If you were to check SQL at this point, you would see that a new content database has been created (my example is WSS_Content). If you check the database roles for the content database on the SQL server, the content database account will be listed (Figure 2.58). Of course, the DBO for the database will be the database access account.
Figure2.57 Confirm the new web application
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Figure 2.58 The Content Database account
A SQL 2005 Management Studio Gotcha If you had the Studio console open when you created the web application and you check to see if the content database was created, the new database may not show up in the console. Even if you do a refresh, it still may not show up. However, if you close the Studio console and then reopen it, it will be there. Therefore, before you panic, be sure to close and reopen the Studio window to confirm that the content database has been created.
Creating the First SharePoint Site Collection When you create a site collection, you are really creating the first, top-most site in the site collection. A site collection is just a combination of sites that has to start somewhere—just as a domain starts with a domain controller. Don’t be surprised if it seems as if you are creating only one site, because you are. Site collections start with one top site and build outward—or maybe more precisely, downward. These sites are usually created from the SharePoint templates—or even SharePoint applications you downloaded from the Internet. You can also customize the templates if you’d like, but for now, we will use the standard templates. Not all sites are created equal. The first site in a collection is the one that all other sites in a site collection hang off of. Because it is the first site, it is considered a parent, and all subsites that are created under it are children. Because of this, the children sites can inherit settings from the parent site. The top-level site has management settings that affect the whole site collection. That’s why the first site in a site collection is so important.
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Figure 2.59 The Create Site Collection page
The Application Created page in SharePoint mentioned that you needed to create a new site collection, and it offered a convenient Create Site Collection link. To create a new site collection, follow these steps:
1. Click on the Create Site Collection link on the Application Created page to go directly to the page to create a new site collection.
Finding the Application Created Page If you navigated away from the Application Created page, you’ll need to go to the Application Management page, and click on the Create Site Collection link under SharePoint Site Management to get to the Create Site Collection page. The Create Site Collection page (see Figure 2.59) contains the Web Application, Title and Description, Web Site Address, Template Selection, Primary and Secondary Site Administrator, and Quota Template sections.
Web Application This dropdown menu already lists the new web application (http://sp2) because that is the only web application available to contain a site collection. It is displayed, reasonably enough, by default.
2. Because the new web application is the web application where we want to put the new site collection, keep the default.
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Title and Description Use something neutral but descriptive for the title and description. Remember that the title will be displayed at the top of every page of this site. These settings can be changed later.
3. Enter a Title and Description. My example uses Company Site for the title and Corporate Collaboration Solution for the description. Web Site Address There are two default URL paths for site collections at this point (as you can imagine, that can be modified). The options for this example, at this point, are to have the URL be http://sp2/ or http://sp2/sites/SiteName.
4. Choose a URL for the site collection. My example uses the first option, making this top-level site the default site accessible by just using the server’s web address. Those URLs are called managed paths, and you can add your own later if you’d like. (We’ll cover this topic in depth in Chapter 8, “Site Collections and Web Applications.”) Managed paths allow you to be more flexible when you set up the paths for new site collections. Template Selection Here you’ll find two types of sites, Collaboration and Meeting. These are the two different site definitions with multiple site templates based on each. Feel free to take a look at the different options. When you select a tab, it will list the templates under that definition, and when you select a template, a brief description will appear to the left of it with a nice graphic that looks absolutely nothing like the finished site.
5. Select a site template from the list. My example will use the Team Site template for the first SharePoint site. This is the site template that the Basic installation uses for its top-level site. It’s the default, standard, and trustworthy, and it will be the site template used for most of this book. Primary Site Collection Administrator This section allows you to select a domain user account (remember, you are using the default Domain Account User mode for this SharePoint server farm) for the primary site collection administrator. It doesn’t have to be the setup account. As a matter of fact, it shouldn’t be. That account should be dedicated to installation only. This setting let’s you assign administration of a site collection to someone other than yourself.
Only Two May Enter Keep in mind that the accounts specified in the Primary and Secondary Site Collection Administrators will be the only members of the new site (other than the server farm and content database account, which should never be used to log in). It is supposed to be a security improvement over the previous version of SharePoint because the setup account and the built-in Administrators are not available by default as members of new sites. Don’t assume you can log in as the setup account to the SharePoint site because it installed SharePoint. That only works for Central Administration.
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If, for some reason, you need to access a site collection and the primary or secondary administrators are not available, you can use the Site collection administrators link in Central Administration. There you can see who the primary and secondary administrator accounts are, and you can replace one of them (or both) with an account you can use to access whatever site collection you need. You can also, of course, add more site collection administrators after the top-level site is created, but initially these two site collection administrators are the only two who can log in.
The User Name field (otherwise known as a People Picker field, I am not kidding), has a check name, and a Browse button, which looks like an address book. If you enter a username in the field, you can confirm that it is spelled correctly by clicking the check name icon to the right of the field.
6. Enter an account name for the primary site collection administrator. This account does not need to have special administrative rights to the local server, it can be any domain user you feel needs to be the administrator of the site collection. My example uses my shareadmin account for the SharePoint site collection administrator account.
No Need to Specify a Domain Notice that, because of the People Picker, you don’t need to specify the domain, such as dem0tek\ shareadmin. The picker is Active Directory–integrated, so it’s fine just to use the username. The People Picker will resolve it for you.
Secondary Site Collection Administrator In this section, you can add another user account. This is user account is also notified about the site collection if the primary administrator is on vacation or dropping the ball. Mind you, these accounts are literally going to be the only members of the whole SharePoint site collection. No other user will be able to log in until you add more people to the site. In this example, we don’t need a second administrator for the site. Quota Template This setting is used to limit the amount of storage space in Megabytes the site collection (meaning this site and all subsites combined) require on the hard drive. We haven’t configured any quotas yet, so this setting is not relevant right now. However, you can set up quotas later and then apply it to this site collection at that time (quotas will be covered in more detail in Chapter 7, “Sites, Subsites, and Workspaces”).
7. If you have completed all your settings for this site collection, click OK. You may need to wait for the operation to complete, but eventually you will get to the Top-Level Site Successfully Created page (Figure 2.60).
8. On the Top-Level Site Successfully Created page, click the link to your new top-level site. My example is http://sp2.
9. A new browser window should open. You should be prompted for a username and password (depending on how you have your browser configured). Use the account you specified as a site collection administrator when you created the site to log in.
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Figure 2.60 The Top-Level Site Successfully Created page
As soon as you log in, you’ll see your fresh new site collection’s top-level site. Notice that it is sporting a nice conservative Team Site template. Figure 2.61 illustrates our Company Site, and the description of the page is listed above the Web Parts area of the page.
Figure 2.61 The new top-level site
The Announcements web part has a “Get Started with Windows SharePoint Services!” entry, which was apparently written by the setup account. This is because the setup account actually created the site (the account still logged in on this server), so its name is on the sample data for the site despite the fact that that account is not a member of the site. Congratulations! You have created a SharePoint web application and site collection and because of that you now know how to create other web applications and site collections (although
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we go into far greater depth in Chapter 8). You also can now appreciate the convenience of doing a Basic Install, because it does all of that for you. You are almost done configuring SharePoint, and it is almost time to start working with it. However, before we do that, we’ll need to finish the initial configuration tasks that require attention.
Post-Installation Configuration Tasks Regardless of how you chose to install SharePoint, at least three more configuration tasks should be done before you start using it. In order for notifications and alerts to work, outgoing mail must be configured. To allow lists and libraries to receive incoming mail, that must be configured also. And, in order for anyone else to use SharePoint, you need to add users. For any of these to work, we need to set them up on the server first.
Configuring Outgoing Email To configure outgoing mail in SharePoint, take a look at the Administrator Tasks on the home page of Central Administration (Figure 2.62). You should still have it open; if not, select Start ➢ Administrative Tools ➢ SharePoint 3.0 Central Administration, and then log in. You may notice that the Create a SharePoint Site task is gone; because when that task was accomplished, it was removed from the list.
Figure 2.62 The Administrator Tasks list changes
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The Convenience of Administrator Tasks The Administrator Tasks list gives a new administrator a list of common tasks that need to be configured when SharePoint is installed. More importantly, it provides a way to get to those settings when you don’t yet know your way around Central Administration. Keep in mind that Central Administration is organized into two pages: Operations. These settings are used to manage the SharePoint server or server farm. Application Management. These settings are used to manage web applications and their site collections. However, until you get the hang of it, you might not be sure what settings fall under which heading. This is why the Administrator Tasks were created. For more information about what each settings link does on those Central Administration pages, check out the Central Administration reference Chapters 9, “Central Administration: Operations” and 10, “Central Administration: Application Management.”
To continue configuring outgoing email, follow these steps:
1. Select Outgoing E-Mail Settings in the Administrator Tasks list, because it’s convenient. It should open a page that contains the Outgoing E-Mail Settings task (see Figure 2.63).
Figure 2.63 The Outgoing E-Mail Settings task
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2. To configure those settings, click Configure Outgoing E-mail Settings in the Action section. This will take you to the configuration settings for outgoing email, which are listed under Topology And Services on the Operations page. The Outgoing E-Mail Settings page has only one section: Mail Settings. It has the fields for Outbound SMTP Server, From Address, Reply To Address, and the Character Set. The default is Unicode UTF-8.
3. For outbound email, you need a valid SMTP server.]My example is running on the DC1.dem0tek.lcl domain controller on my internal network. You also need to specify a From address. Because this account doesn’t need to receive email, the From address doesn’t need to be a real email address. However, you also need to specify a Reply To address, which does need to be a real email account so it can receive replies. See my example settings in Figure 2.64.
Figure 2.64 The Outgoing E-Mail settings
For this example, the outgoing configuration is going to be: Outbound SMTP server: DC1.dem0tek.lcl From address:
[email protected] Reply To address:
[email protected]
4. Make sure that your settings are correct for your environment, and click OK to configure outgoing email. That should take you back to the Central Administration home page. Notice that the Outgoing E-Mail Settings task is gone from the Administrator Tasks list.
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D´ ej` a Vu All Over Again Why can you set outgoing email on the Operations page and on the Application Management page? You just configured outgoing mail for the server farm. Those settings are now the default outgoing email settings for the whole server, every web application, and every site for SharePoint. However, you can set outgoing email individually on each web application as well, if you’d like. The fact that some configuration tasks can be done both at the server farm level and at a web application level can be confusing. For your convenience, you can configure things like outgoing email at the server farm level. Think of it as setting server farm defaults. Configure it once, and those configurations apply to all web applications, websites, etc. all over the farm. However, to be flexible, you can also configure settings for things like outgoing email on a web application by web application basis as well. Don’t think of it as confusingly redundant; think of it as remarkably flexible.
Configuring Incoming Email SharePoint uses incoming email to receive email for incoming email-enabled lists, and it redirects those emails to those lists so they can add those emails as list items. This requires the SharePoint server and, more particularly, the SharePoint Timer service to know where to get the incoming email addressed to its lists, what the email alias for the server is going to be, and whether or not the SMTP service is allowed to accept email from anyone or only SharePoint members, to avoid spam. This time, you are not going to use the Administrator Tasks list to get to the incoming email settings. Instead, you are going to go directly there.
1. On the Central Administration home page, click Operations (either the tab at the top of the page, or the link in the Quick Launch bar on the left side of the page). On the Operations page (Figure 2.65), the settings are listed under general headings such as Topology And Services, Security Configuration, Logging And Reporting, Global Configuration, Backup And Restore, and Data Configuration.
Figure 2.65 The Operations page
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2. In the Topology and Services section, click Incoming E-Mail Settings. This will take you to the Configure Incoming E-Mail Settings page. This page has four sections. The descriptions of these sections are so verbose that the page is pretty long, even if the settings themselves are pretty sparse (see Figure 2.66). Don’t ignore the descriptions though, they are informative.
Figure 2.66 The Incoming E-Mail settings
Enable Incoming E-Mail This section has two settings: “Enable sites on this server to receive e-mail” and Settings Mode. The first setting is pretty self-explanatory. It is currently set to No, which is why all other settings on the page are grayed out. To enable incoming email, change the setting to Yes. Once you set “Enable sites on this server to receive e-mail,” all the other settings will become available. Settings Mode has two options: Automatic and Advanced. If you are using the IIS SMTP service to handle incoming mail for SharePoint, you can use the Automatic Settings mode because it automatically knows what folder the IIS SMTP service uses for incoming email by default (it’s called a drop folder).
Timer Service Timing The SharePoint Timer service checks for incoming email approximately every 30 seconds.
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If you are not using the SMTP service to handle incoming email, or you have specified in SMTP that incoming email should not go to the default folder, you must use the Advanced Setting mode. This means that you need to specify the folder that SharePoint should check for new email.
3. Select Yes to enable Incoming email. My example uses the IIS SMTP service locally for incoming email, and the drop folder location has not changed. This means that it will use the Automatic Settings mode. Chances are good that your server, if you have been following along, will be using the default drop folder location as well, so select Automatic Settings mode as well. If not, select Advanced Settings mode, and specify the custom location of the drop folder.
Changing Your Drop Folder If you do change the drop folder that SharePoint should check for emails, make sure that the SharePoint Timer Service account, which is the database access account, has the right to access the folder.
Directory Management Service (DMS) This service is an interesting one. It is meant to make it easy for Exchange users to find the email address of lists that have incoming email enabled in the Global Address List and create distribution lists based on SharePoint groups. On Exchange 2003 email-enabled Active Directory networks, it literally adds a contact object to the OU for each incoming email enabled list, group, site, or library. To use DMS, you must create an OU in Active Directory where distribution groups and contact records will be created for the email-enabled lists. The database access account has control delegated to it to create, delete, and manage user accounts in that OU. To work, DMS does require Exchange (2003) and the schema extensions that Exchange adds in Active Directory. My example will not enable this service at this point because we should do a straightforward configuration to make sure incoming email works. However, you can come back and enable DMS any time, so it’s okay to set up incoming email first without it, makes sure it works, and then come back and do DMS later (if you’re running Exchange 2003).
4. Do not enable Directory Management Services at this time. For information about how to configure DMS, check out Chapter 15, “Advanced Installation and Configuration.” Keep in mind that there are documents out there that imply that you must enable DMS to get incoming email to work. That is not correct. It works perfectly fine without it. Incoming E-Mail Server Display Address In this section, the E-Mail Server Display Address field indicates what will be displayed as the server address for the incoming mail. The default is this SharePoint server’s FQDN. This means that when you enable a list or library to receive incoming email, and you specify the list’s email alias, it will allow you to add a unique name@ to your server’s FQDN, such as
[email protected].
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Using FQDN for the Incoming Email Address There is a slick reason that the FQDN of the server is used for the incoming email address. When your users send email in the internal network to that address, your internal mail server will go to DNS to figure out where to put the email. The SharePoint server is listed in DNS by FQDN, so it will be sent there without the hassle of additional DNS entries. Make sure your internal email server is set up to relay email to the SharePoint server, and that the SMTP service in IIS on the SharePoint server is accepting those relays (it accepts all by default). There are issues with that if you want to have people outside the office send email to the SharePoint lists and libraries (you’ll need to do additional configuring and change the display address to use an external email address). However, for internal email, using the server name is a convenient workaround.
5. Enter the appropriate server FQDN for the SharePoint server. In my example the server’s FQDN is SP2.dem0tek.lcl. It is an internal network address only, so it uses a non-Internet standard top-level domain name. In this case it is correct to accept that as the domain portion of the incoming email address for lists and libraries.
Safe Email Servers The settings here allow you to specify if SharePoint will accept email from any email server or from only certain specified servers.
6. Leave it at Accept Mail from All E-Mail Servers if you don’t have any rogue email servers in your office. However, if that is a problem you can list only the specific email servers from which SharePoint will accept email. Just keep in mind that you can come back and change the list at any time
7. When you have finished configuring your incoming email settings, click OK.
Specifying a Different Domain Alias for Incoming Email If you want your incoming email address default to be something that external clients might be able to use, then using the FQDN of the SharePoint server for the email alias is probably a bad idea. There are four parts to specifying a different domain alias for incoming email: the SMTP service on the SharePoint server, DNS on your network, your office email server, and setting the incoming email address on the SharePoint server to the new domain alias. To start, you need to decide what you want the address to be; for my example, I am going to use dem0share.com. Then follow these steps: 1. Go to the IIS management console by choosing Start ➢ Administrator Tools ➢ Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager. 2. Verify that you can see the nodes under your local computer in the tree pane of the console.
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3. Click on the plus sign next to Default SMTP Virtual Server node. Select Domains. The local server will be listed as a default domain.
4. If you want to list a different domain that the SMTP service will recognize and accept email from besides the default local server name, right-click Domains in the tree pane or action pane. In the popup menu, select New. From that menu, select Domain. That will trigger the New SMTP Domain Wizard. 5. Because you are creating a new alias for the SMTP server to accept, select Alias and click Next.
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6. On the next screen, enter the domain alias you want the SMTP service to accept. My example uses dem0share.com. 7. When you are done entering your domain alias, click Finish. You should now see your new domain alias in the IIS console.
Next, you need to let DNS know what the new domain alias is by creating a new Forward Lookup zone. Then you need to create records there to point at the SharePoint server. Follow these steps: 1. Open the DNS Management console by choosing Start ➢ Administrative Tools ➢ DNS. 2. Right-click the Forward Lookup Zones node, and select New Zone. 3. In the New Zone Wizard Welcome screen, click Next. Choose Primary zone for the zone type, and click Next.
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4. On the next screen in the wizard, you can choose how the new zone information will replicate to other servers in the domain. My example uses the default. Click Next. 5. In the Zone Name field, enter your domain alias. My example uses dem0share.com. Click Next.
6. In the Dynamic Update screen, choose the update process that best suits your network. My example uses the default. Click Next. 7. The Completing The New Zone Wizard screen will display the new zone name, the lookup type (forward), and the fact that it’s an Active Directory–Integrated Primary zone. Click Finish to complete the process. You should now have a new zone listed under Forward Lookup Zones in the DNS console. My example is dem0share.com.
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In the zone, you need to create a host record to let DNS know that there is a machine with the name of your SharePoint server using the domain alias. Then with that record, you can create an MX record to let DNS know that that host is a mail server. To do that, follow these steps: 1. To add a host record for the SharePoint server to the new zone, double-click the new zone to open it. 2. Right-click in the action pane of the console, and select New Host (A) from the popup menu. 3. In the dialog box, enter the machine name of the SharePoint server in the Name field. In the IP Address field, type the IP address of your SharePoint server.
Don’t worry about the two boxes at the bottom of the dialog box. In this example I don’t want just any authenticated user to update the record, and I don’t have a reverse lookup zone, so I don’t need a pointer record. To add the host record to your new zone, click Add Host. (Mind you, if your environment requires it, you can add a cname or alias record to map the new domain name to the SharePoint server instead of a host record. That means the MX record will have to refer to the server in its native, internal domain.) 4. A popup will tell you the host was added successfully. Close that popup, and close the New Host dialog box. 5. You need to create an MX record for the SharePoint server. Right-click in the action pane, and select New Mail Exchanger (MX) from the popup menu. 6. In the FQDN field, enter the name of the host record you just created. My example is sp2.dem0share.com. You can set the mail priority if you’d like. My example uses the default
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of 10. When you’re done, click OK. Your DNS server now knows what to do with requests for email addressed to your new domain alias.
Now you need to make sure that your email server can forward email to your SharePoint server. For Exchange, you need to create an SMTP connector that points to the new MX record in your new DNS zone. For Server 2003’s built-in POP3 with SMTP (which is what I am using for this example), you need to enable relay on the SMTP service for that server. That means you would go to the IIS management console, right-click the default SMTP virtual server, and go to properties in the popup menu and: 1. In the Properties dialog box, select the Access tab. Click Relay to specify how to handle relaying email. You can either specify the address of the SharePoint server and select Only The List Below,or you can leave the list blank and select All Except The List Below (meaning that it would exclude whatever was in the list below and that if it’s blank, all relays will be allowed).
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2. When you’re done specifying the relay, click OK to get out of the Relay Restrictions dialog box. Then click OK to close the Default SMTP Virtual Server Properties dialog box. You can close IIS too if you’d like. Finally, you need to go back to the SharePoint server and make the incoming email address for the server match your new domain alias. Follow these steps: 1. In SharePoint Central Administration, go to the Operations page and click the Configure Incoming E-Mail Settings link.
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2. On the Configure Incoming E-Mail Settings page, scroll down to the Incoming E-Mail Server Display Address section, and change the address in the field to your new domain alias. My example uses dem0share.com. After you change the incoming email alias and click OK, it will take you to the Operations page of Central Administration. Later, when you enable incoming email on libraries or lists (something we do in Chapter 5, “Introduction to Lists”), and a user in the office sends email to that list, the email will go to the drop folder on the SharePoint server. Then it will be picked up by the SharePoint Timer service, parsed, and placed in the correct list. My example emailed “Test of Alias” to an incoming email enabled Announcements list.
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Now you can configure your libraries and certain lists to receive incoming email for an address other than the server’s internal network FQDN. Not all lists can do email; they don’t have fields that map to a simple email header. However, a developer could create some custom email event handlers if you wanted. If you did not set up incoming email in Central Administration, the option to configure incoming email in the settings for the lists or libraries in SharePoint will not appear. So if you have to troubleshoot incoming email for a SharePoint site, you should recognize this problem when you see it.
Adding Users Obviously, SharePoint won’t be very useful if no on can use it. So to get up and running, let’s add a user.
1. To add users to a SharePoint site collection, simply go to the home page of the top-level site (in my example that would be http://sp2).
2. Click on the People and Groups link near the bottom of the navigation bar (called a Quick Launch bar) on the left side of the home page. It will open the People And Groups page (see Figure 2.67). On the left side of the page is a navigation bar listing the SharePoint groups available for the site collection. They are groups in which to add user accounts (or domain security groups containing user accounts) that you want to give certain permissions to. An administrator creates a group and assigns permission levels to it. Then you add users to the groups, giving those users those permissions. By default there are three SharePoint groups: Members (who are allowed to contribute to the site), Visitors (who are only allowed to read what is on the site), and Owners (who are users with full, administrative control of the site collection). When you go to the People And Groups page it automatically displays the contents of the site Members group, since that’s usually where you will be adding the most users. In this example I would like to add a user so they can start contributing to the site, so this page is perfect.
3. To add one or more users, click the New button. On the Add Users page, there are three sections: Add Users, Give Permission, and Send E-Mail. In the Add Users section is the Users/Groups field (this is a larger People Picker field than the one for specifying administrators for site collections earlier in the chapter). This field allows you to add multiple entries separated by semicolons. You can also use the address book button at the bottom right of the Users/Groups field and browse the Active Directory for user accounts and security groups. Or you can type in the name of the user, users, or even domain security group you’d like to add to SharePoint.
4. Click in the Users/Groups field. In my example I am going to add the user saffron to the site Members group (see Figure 2.68 for my example).
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Figure 2.67 People and Groups page
Figure 2.68 Add Users page
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Management Trick Although I am keeping it simple here, it is a good idea to consider adding users to SharePoint as part of a domain security group rather than as individuals. Because there are only so many security objects that SharePoint can handle, if a user is added to SharePoint as part of a domain security group, they are considered part of that security object instead of an individual object to be managed.
In the Give Permission section, you can either specify the SharePoint group the user(s) should be a member of, or you can select the permission level(s) they should have explicitly. In this example, keeping the default of Company Site Members selected is appropriate. The point of clicking the New button on the Members page was for this default.
5. In the Give Permission section, in the Add Users To A SharePoint Group field, keep the selection for the Members group for the site.
6. In the Send E-Mail section you can choose to send an email invitation to the user. My example is going to allow the email message to be sent.
7. If all the settings are in order, click OK to add the user to SharePoint. As you can see in Figure 2.69, Saffron was added to my site’s Members group and can now log in to the site as a contributor. This should give you an idea as to how easy it is to add users to SharePoint. For more information about SharePoint groups, creating custom SharePoint groups, as well as using and creating permission levels, see Chapter 11, “Users and Permissions.”
Figure 2.69 New User in site Members group
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You are ready to move on to using Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, administering it, or customizing it. SharePoint is up and going. You know what it takes to prepare for SharePoint, to install SharePoint, what happens after you do install it, and how to do the post-installation, initial configuration tasks. You may have noticed that there are links on the Administrator Tasks list that you have not touched. That is because they are not really a priority. SharePoint will work fine if they are left alone for right now. The workflow and diagnostic logging settings are enabled by default. You can adjust those settings later. The Add Antivirus Protection setting requires that you purchase SharePoint-aware antivirus protection. All of these settings and more are going to be explained in Chapter 9, “Central Administration: Operations.”
Adding a new Farm Administrator It stands to reason that you might want to add users to Central Administration so more people can administer SharePoint. It is a little different than adding users to normal SharePoint sites. To start there is really only one SharePoint group for Central Administration. By default, any users added to the site are considered Farm Administrators. In addition, there is no link for People And Groups in the Quick Launch bar like there is for most SharePoint sites. Instead the People And Groups page is accessed through the site settings. To get There: click on the Site Actions button on the right side of the page above the web part area. That will open a Site Settings page for the site. Go to the Users And Permissions category and click on People And groups. This will bring you to the People And Groups: Farm Administrator’s page. From here you can add users just as you would for a normal site. Keep in mind that if an account you add as a Farm Administrator is not a local administrator of the server (or a member of Domain Admins), then they will not see all the settings that a local/domain admin can. For Operations, they will be unable to manage services on the server because that requires administrative rights. In Site Settings for the site itself, they cannot be site collection administrators by default, and therefore cannot do site collection administration. And in Application Management, they cannot create or extend web applications. So if ever a farm administrator complains that they cannot see all of the settings some other farm administrator can, chances are good that they are not allowed to administer the local server either.
The Bottom Line Prepare for the installation of SharePoint SharePoint does have certain software and hardware requirements before it can be installed. In addition, some of those requirements vary depending on the type of installation you choose. It is good to know what to install, how to install them, and in what order to be prepared for installing SharePoint. Master It
Does SharePoint require SMTP?
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Install SharePoint using the Basic and Advanced, Stand-Alone, and Advanced Server Farm Installation options There are several types of SharePoint installations available; Basic, which is a single server installation in which installs without intervention with all default settings and uses a Windows Internal Database; Advanced, Stand-alone, which is essentially the Basic Installation but you have a few basic configuration options before configuration begins; and Advanced, Web Front End (Server Farm) installation, which allows you to manage all configuration options and specify the SQL server that will manage the databases. Each installation type has its strengths and weaknesses, and it’s good to know about them before you begin. Master It network?
Can you install and use SharePoint if you don’t have a SQL server on your
Determine what gets created when SharePoint installs From Basic to Server Farm, it is good to know every step of the way the repercussions of each installation, configuration and service that SharePoint adds and/or enables. Master It What is one way to confirm that the SharePoint services are running properly on the server? Perform the initial configuration tasks after a SharePoint install (and understand why you perform them) After installation, SharePoint can require additional configuration before you can call it your own. It is good to know what the necessary settings are to quickly get SharePoint up and running to the point where an administrator can start working on it. Master It
Does incoming email require Directory Management Service to function?
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II
Using Windows SharePoint Services 3.0
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Introduction to the SharePoint Interface When you look at a SharePoint site for the first time, you might think it looks like a normal website—and it is. The beauty of SharePoint is its simple usefulness as well as its versatility. At first glance, you can see many of SharePoint’s standard features. Most of the attributes of a SharePoint web page are focused on ease of navigation and consistency of design. It may not be a blinking, glittering, extravaganza of art and animation, but it gets the job done. Remember that the point of SharePoint is to be easy for the users to use, navigate, and understand, while being really flexible in terms of it’s usefulness. Consider it a framework, filled with potential, but not truly complete until you make it your own. In this chapter you’ll learn how to: ◆
Identify SharePoint’s navigation tools and figure out how to use them
◆
Find a list or library
◆
Use the Quick Launch bar
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Use a breadcrumb
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Understand a content page
Microsoft has particular terminology for most of SharePoint’s web page features and attributes. In order for us to have a common language, I will point out this terminology as we go. From the start, let’s take a look at the SharePoint top-level site we created when installing SharePoint (either Basic or Advanced, Server Farm). I chose to use the Team Site template for my top-level site because it is a good, standard starting point. It has the most commonly used lists, libraries, and web parts, as well as standard navigation tools that are a good introduction point for all things SharePoint. Later on in Chapter 7, “Sites, Subsites and Workspaces,” you will look at the other templates available for sites straight out of SharePoint’s box, but for now, the Team Site template is my favorite for a top-most entry to the rest of your site collection.
Team Site Home Page The home page of any site is like the foyer of a building. It is intended to be the entrance everyone uses to get into the site. It has navigational elements, like a building directory, that allow you to see at a glance where else you can go in the site and how to get there. In addition, like a bulletin
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board in a foyer, the home page has an area to display announcements and other information that administration might feel visitors would find important. To see what I mean, let’s open the Team Site home page:
1. Open Internet Explorer (if you’re not already there), and enter the address of your SharePoint site, if you followed the defaults for your first site collection or used the Basic option for installation, use the machine name of your SharePoint server in the Address bar. Press Enter. Keep in mind that if you used the defaults, that the SharePoint-80 web application (or IIS Web Site, depending on how you look at it) is listening for all port 80 traffic directed to the server. That’s why you only need to use the server’s name to pull up the SharePoint site. This traffic will direct the users to the site at that root address. In my example, that is the Team site.
2. You may be prompted to log in to get to the SharePoint site. Use the domain\username format, and use the account you specified as the primary site administrator (the owner of the top-level site). For example, my account is dem0tek\shareadmin. Once you are logged in, ASP.NET will take a while to compile the page, and then the home page of your first SharePoint site collection in your first SharePoint web application will appear (see Figure 3.1).
Figure 3.1 A typical SharePoint home page
Home Page Anatomy Now that we’re on the home page, you can see that it does have some navigational elements, letting you know what other pages or sites are available from here. There is an area in the center/right of the page for announcements and other information. In order for us to have a common language as to what these features are called, let’s dissect its parts. Remember, this is the interface for a home page created with the Team Site template. You may have chosen a different
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template for your top-level site, so your home page may look different on your server. Don’t worry about it. Every site template in SharePoint has the same underlying capabilities, but they are laid out differently based on what they are meant to do, such as blogging, meeting management, or document management. Don’t be alarmed if your site doesn’t look exactly like mine. Many of the navigation features are the same. On the Team site, there are certain common features for most pages. Across the top of the Home page is a light blue bar that contains the name of the site on the left (that is a global breadcrumb, and lets you come back to this page from anywhere in the site collection), and the Welcome Menu and Help button on the right. There is also an icon (that you can change) and the Title of the site on the left of the page below the light blue bar, with a search field to the right of that. Below the Search field is a Site Actions tab (actually, it’s a drop down menu button, disguised as a tab). Each of these components has a purpose. Leter, they will be covered individually in more depth, but here’s a quick reminder as to where everything is and what they were meant to do:
Graphically Challenged or Secretly Useful? You might wonder why the title of the page is listed in a smaller font right above the larger, bolder title of the page. That’s because the top blue bar never changes, regardless of what list, library, page, or subsite you are using. (This is a good reason to think seriously about your site names.) This bar is considered the “global breadcrumb” and can be used by a user to get back to the top-level site from a subsite, even if it doesn’t inherit its Top Link bar from its parent site. In the previous version of SharePoint, it was easy to get “trapped” in a subsite (or a subsite of a subsite) below a top-level site with no navigation tool to get back to the top. As a result, Microsoft is now dedicated to using breadcrumb navigation wherever possible. Just remember, breadcrumbs only tell you where you’ve been. That’s why SharePoint uses other navigation tools to get you where you’re going, without having to actually type in the Address bar.
Search Field The Search field is on the right side of the page, across from the site title and icon. It has a scope dropdown list, which allows you to search the site for something or to narrow that search when you are in a list or library to just that list or library (for faster, more direct results). Top Link Bar On the left, below the title and icon for the site is the Top Link bar. This bar is intended to make navigation easier. It offers tabs for each site in the collection, starting with the home site (the first of all tabs made in that Top Link bar). This Top Link bar can, obviously, be edited. It can be inherited by subsites for consistent navigation (or not, your choice). Right now, the only tab listed there is Home, which is the site’s home page and the one we’re on. Whenever you go to a list or another page from the home page, you can easily go back to the home page by clicking the Home tab. Site Actions Menu The Site Actions menu is on the opposite side of the page from the Top Link bar’s Home tab. This tab shows up if you have the right to edit the home page or administer the site. It is an administrative feature, so it is governed by SharePoint’s security filter, which means that your login controls what you see. The average user with only the permission to read content on the site will not see the Site Actions menu because they cannot do anything with it. This is a vast improvement over the previous version of SharePoint, where users could see all the powerful, tempting links to administrative tools and settings but weren’t told they couldn’t use them until the users clicked on them and waited for the Access Denied page to load in the
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browser. The Site Actions menu contains links used to configure site settings, edit the page, or create lists, libraries, or subsites. Quick Launch Bar The Quick Launch bar is on the left side of the content area of the page itself. It is a focal point for navigating around the lists, libraries, and subsites of a SharePoint site collection. It displays available lists, libraries, and subsites for the site collection, in addition to links to the user Recycle Bin and the People and Groups page. Although this is a useful element to offer users a convenient way to access site content, you can elect to have items not appear in the Quick Launch bar, if you would like to make it a bit less convenient to access them. Keep in mind all site lists, libraries, and subsites are displayed on the All Site Content page as a fall back should something be accidentally missing from the Quick Launch bar. Web Parts On the center/right side of the home page, you’ll find the page’s real content: the web parts. Home pages for SharePoint sites are often called web part pages because they are the only pages in the out-of-the-box site templates that are meant to primarily contain web parts. Other pages can have web parts, but Home pages were the only ones meant to showcase them by default. Web parts are little ASP.NET (2.0 or 1.1 for backward compatibility) controls designed to display the content of a page, list, folder, library, etc. Unassumingly powerful, these web parts can actually pull data to display almost anything displayable on the Internet and more. Out of the box, there are web parts that display a summary view for each list and library created in SharePoint. They give you an “at a glance” view of new entries for the list they contain and an opportunity to check out the entry or list at a single click. By default, the Team Site template home page has several lists already made to give you an idea of what it can do. It gives you an effective starting point to simply get up and running. Because those lists exist, the home page can also be populated by those list’s web parts. Web parts automatically generated by the Team Site template include: Announcements, Calendar (as you can see in Figure 3.1), additional little web parts to hold an image, and a web part for links you might like to add to the home page. You can add, remove, or rearrange web parts in this area to make it more relevant to your users. This will be the first place they will look when they browse to this site before going to the library or list where they need to work.
Types of Pages Now that we’ve gotten an idea of each part of the Home page, let’s examine the way SharePoint differentiates between the types of pages it offers its users. All pages in SharePoint, out of the box, are built from templates and definitions that already exist in SharePoint. The web part page is one kind of SharePoint page. It has a section for containing and displaying web parts, as you saw with the Home page. Another kind of page is a content page. This kind of page is used to display the contents of lists and libraries (it can also hold Web parts as well, but that is not its primary purpose). Remember SharePoint’s function is to be the front end that displays data that is actually stored in a database on the backend. That means that content pages enable you to view a list or library’s associated table’s data, manipulate that view (or report, which is essentially what a view is), add data to the underlying table, and even remove data. All data, such as announcements, tasks, events in a calendar, even document files in a library, are stored in tables in the content database. Both web part and content pages comply with the site design for the pages, displaying page attributes such as the Quick Launch bar and the features in the header area of the page, such as the Welcome Menu, Search, and site title.
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In addition to web part and content pages are administration, setting, or application pages. These pages are the ones stored in the layout directory for the site, and are the site management pages used to list settings, actually configure those settings, or create site objects. Site Settings, the Recycle Bin page, and the Create page are good examples of those administration pages. You will be able to identify this type of page because it generally doesn’t have the normal layout that web part or content pages do, meaning there is no search field and no Quick Launch bar. Finally there is one page that doesn’t really fit any of the previous categories, and that’s the All Site Content page. It looks like a page that just lists all site contents, organized by type of content, such as lists, libraries, or discussions. This page does have a view field like a content page, and the navigational elements of a normal web part or content page, but it has no search field. So it is not quite a content page (despite literally displaying the site’s contents) and not quite an administrative page, but something in between. We will be checking it out in detail later in the chapter, so you can see what I mean.
Now that we have some common terminology, let’s take a closer look at some of the active features of the SharePoint home page.
Welcome Menu At the top right of the Home page is the Welcome menu. This feature is a nice addition for anyone who used the previous version of SharePoint because it indicates with which account you are logged in. If you move your cursor over it and click, a dropdown menu will appear, as shown in Figure 3.2
Figure 3.2 The Welcome menu
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Figure 3.3 The My Settings User Information page
My Settings The My Settings Welcome menu option opens a User Information page that contains the user information for the account with which you’re logged in (see Figure 3.3). This is a convenient place to confirm your email account and change it if needed. You can also use it to add and edit personal information such as department, photo, job title, etc. Sign In As Different User The Sign In As Different User menu item allows you to log out of SharePoint without closing the browser, and log in as a different user. This is useful to test the rights of particular users.
Dual Identity There is a flaw when you log in as a different user in SharePoint. If, you are still logged in on your computer with your account, and log into SharePoint with a different account, you may get errors trying to access web parts and pages that use Windows Explorer to view folder content. This is because, although you are logged in as person A (in SharePoint), you may be really using Internet Explorer as person B (on the local computer). When the option to use Windows Explorer to see files through IE becomes an issue, IE checks its local user’s rights, not the person you are logged into SharePoint as. Therefore, this can be a problem when troubleshooting a user’s access issues. Your local user could have more rights than that person and, therefore, have no problem accessing folders, or you could have fewer rights. Just remember this if you have any problems with Explorer view.
Sign Out Sign Out actually just tries to close the web browser (see Figure 3.4). If you click OK in the dialog box, it will close the browser. If you click Cancel, it will remain at the Sign Out page, at which time you can use the Go back to site link (the small text just above the title of the page) to trigger a prompt to log back in.
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Figure 3.4 The Sign Out page
Personalize This Page This link is interesting. SharePoint allows users to create a personal view (or version) of the home page by letting them rearrange, remove, or add existing web parts to the web part content area. This gives them a little flexibility and allows them to see what is most important to them as soon as they log into the site. If a user does not have the right to personalize their view of the home page, this menu option will not be available. This link will place the page in Edit mode, showing the different Web Part zones (the columns where you can place web parts above one another). In each zone there is a button to add more web parts (see Figure 3.5). We will be looking much more closely at web parts and what you can do with them in the next chapter. If a page has been personalized, then Personal View can be an additional menu option beneath Personalize this Page, indicating the user is viewing the shared version of the page. They can use the option to switch to viewing their personalized version.
Figure 3.5 Personalizing the home page
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Help The Help icon is to the right of the Welcome menu, and takes you to the Help page (Figure 3.6). Like many Microsoft products, SharePoint Help is pretty hit or miss. As of the writing of this book, occasional help documents actually suggest checking online for better, more up-to-date information.
Figure 3.6 The Help page
Search The Search field is below the Welcome menu and Help icon on the top right of the page. This field directly relates to the Search service that we enabled in Chapter 2, “Installation.” To use it, just enter the word (or words) for which you are looking. Search doesn’t perform partial word matching or Boolean logic, but it can do additions or exceptions. You can include or exclude words using the plus (+) or minus (−) signs (for example, “orange −juice +zest”). The Search scope dropdown field to the left of the Search field tells SharePoint to broaden or narrow the search scope. If you are in a list or library, you can narrow your search scope to that list using the Scope dropdown list. If you are in a list but want to broaden your search to include the whole site (just in case), you can specify This Site.
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What Exactly Does Search Search? Search will index list item contents (the contents of all fields of all lists and libraries) as well as the contents of files stored in libraries, as long as those file types can be indexed. Indexing uses ifilters (get it? index filters) specific for the file type they will be indexing. SharePoint can index Office files, as well as HTML and TIFF automatically. To index other kinds of files, you’ll need to get ifilters for them.
Keep in mind that searches are performed top down in a site collection; therefore, subsites can show up in a search of a site, but only from that point in the hierarchy down. Searches scoped for a site can’t search for text in the sites above itself. To search an entire site collection, always start at the top-level site. Another thing to remember is that searches are limited by site collection. You can’t find something in one site collection by looking for it in another. So pay attention to how you design your site collections. If users clearly understand what goes in which site collection, figuring out where to search should be easy.
MOSS 2007 for Search Microsoft was clever about searching. They took the expanded search capabilities of MOSS (which they knew was a tempting feature, but not enough to make the whole package worth the money), isolated them, packaged them, and resold them as MOSS for Search. This new package can be added to WSS 3.0, and gives administrators who just want the MOSS-style search capabilities without the MOSS enterprise features the ability to stay with Windows SharePoint Services but get all of the MOSS search capabilities. Those Search capabilities include searching across site collections’searching non-SharePoint locations, such as file shares and the ability to have more indexing control. Users can also modify the way Search performs and organizes results by best bets, partial words, and more. All they have to do is buy the license for MOSS for Search, and then all the Client Access Licenses, of course.
After you enter your search query in the Search field and click the “go Search” button (it looks like a magnifying glass), the Search service will query the index files for the most recent changes. It will then query the Search database looking for web pages that contain the words queried. It will generate a results page with links to the pages that contain a match. The user can then decide which results they want to click on to find the content they are seeking. There can be some redundancy in the results returned. Anything—the document contents, that document’s record in the library, the content page of the document library itself—that contains the queried words will show up as a result.
Site Actions The Site Actions menu is the tab beneath the Search field on the right of the page. This menu offers the user a list of options to manage the site, depending on the rights of the account with which they are logged in. If the user only holds the right to view the site and read list entries and documents, the Site Actions menu won’t appear to them. If you’re following along from the previous chapter, you’re
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logged in as the site administrator if you did a Server Farm install. Alternatively, if you performed the Basic install, you are logged in with the setup account permissions. In either case, you have the right to access the Site Actions menu. Actually, you have something of an obligation to access it, because it is where you access the site settings that let you configure and manage this site and aspects of the whole site collections (by virtue of being the only site in the collection at this point). If you open the Site Actions menu, you’ll see the following menu options shown in Figure 3.7.
Figure 3.7 The Site Actions menu
Create The Create link opens the Create page for the site, with the ubiquitous Site Title, Welcome menu, Help, Home tab, and Site Actions menu in the header (or top) area of the page. There is no Search option for the Create page, what you see is what you get. On this page is listed, in categories, all the lists, other pages, as well as sites and workspaces, that can be created (see Figure 3.8).
Figure 3.8 The Create page
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If you clicked the Site Action menu on this page, you might also notice that the Edit This Page option is missing. This is because this is not a web part page, which is what that menu option edits. Ironically, the Create option is still on the Site Action menu, even though it would take you to this very page if you chose it. This is because attributes such as the Site Action menu are standard for most pages, regardless—even if you are already on the page to which the menu item refers. Edit Page This link lets you edit the web parts on this page for everyone to view. (It gives you the impression that you can edit the whole home page, but that’s not the case). When you edit the page from the Site Actions menu, it edits the Shared view of the web parts on the page, meaning that this will be the default view of this page for anyone logging into the site without a personal version set up. It works just like the Personalize This Page option, except the changes you make to the web parts will be the default for all users who didn’t personalize. (See Figure 3.5 for an idea of what it looks like when you are editing a web part page.) Site Settings This menu option is critical because it is the only way, from the home page, to get to the underlying configuration settings for this site. It is not available to those who don’t have the right to manage the site. If you selected this option, it would take you to Site Settings page, which contains the links available for configuring this site’s settings (Figure 3.9).
Figure 3.9 The Site Settings page
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Quick Launch Bar The Quick Launch bar was meant for you to customize—at least to the extent of deciding what lists, libraries, and subsites you want to display there for the users to access easily. A few links always remain the same and cannot be removed from the bar (Figure 3.10). You can also change the order or add links to the Quick Launch Bar if you’d like.
Figure 3.10 An example of the Quick Launch bar
It’s Always There for You The Quick Launch bar follows you almost anywhere you go on the team site, sticking like glue to the left side of every library and list page. The only time it disappears is when you are configuring settings of the site, libraries, or lists.
View All Site Content This link is used to give you (and the users) access to all site content (see Figure 3.11). Because someone who creates a list or library can choose not to add it to the Quick Launch bar, this helps avoid the issue of “How to get to a list that isn’t displayed conveniently in the Quick Launch bar but I still need to use it?”
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Figure 3.11 The All Site Content page
Otherwise known as “I know I left that list around here somewhere,” the View All Site Content link takes you to a page that contains everything associated with a particular site. The list of contents is grouped by type: List, Library (two kinds actually, in case you might have document libraries or picture libraries), Discussion (which is actually a kind of list), Survey, and Subsites (known as sites and workspaces, because a workspace is a subsite with a template meant to be focused on a specific work task). Even the Recycle Bin can be accessed for the All Site Content page because, it’s part of the site’s contents. Notice that this page has the Quick Launch bar on the left. A breadcrumb (Company Site>All Site Content in our example) above the page’s title indicates that you are now in the All Site content page, from the Company site (the home page of my Team site). All the links to go back the way you came are active in the breadcrumb, but the one indicating the page you’re on isn’t. This is why, for example, Company Site is blue, but All Site Content is gray in my breadcrumb. On the right of this page, below the title, is the View menu. This menu gives you the option to filter the view of the contents to a particular category.
No Searching Available Strangely, the View All Site Content page does not have the Search field available. If your site becomes full of all kinds of lists, libraries, and subsites, you will not be able to do a quick search through the list
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here. You’ll have to use IE’s browser “Find on this Page” capability for that. To be fair, you can’t search any of the configuration settings pages, for some reason. However, the View All Site Content page isn’t really a configuration page. It’s just another peculiarity of SharePoint.
Documents, Lists, Discussions, Sites, and Surveys Headings Most people consider the Documents, Lists, Discussions, and Sites links to be just organizational headings on the Quick Launch bar, indicating that everything in its section of the bar is of a certain type, but that is not the case. Those heading links also provide a quick way to get to the View All Site Content page, with the view on that page filtered to display only that header’s type of list, library, or site (Figure 3.12). Several headings, such as Surveys, Pictures, and Sites, do not show up on the Quick Launch bar until their type of content gets created on the site.
Figure 3.12 The View AllSite Content page filtered to show only lists
Missing Surveys and Picture Library Headings Surveys are a type of list that do not show up initially in the Quick Launch bar. They don’t show up because SharePoint does not have a default survey built in to the Team Site template. If you
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create a survey (which we will do in Chapter 5, “Introduction to Lists”), the Surveys heading shows up on the Quick Launch bar. Therefore, if a site has no surveys (and never did) that heading is not there, and if it does (or did), it is. The same goes for picture libraries. The Picture Library heading doesn’t show up on the Quick Launch bar until you’ve created one. Even if you delete the actual picture library, its heading will remain once it’s been created. People and Groups The People and Groups link in the Quick Launch bar takes you to the People and Groups page in Site Settings where you can view (and edit if you have the appropriate permissions) a list of users for the site. (Figure 3.13). The theory is that by letting users see who else is a member of the site, they will have a convenient way to find those users’ email addresses and other user information. This may explain why this version of SharePoint no longer has a default Contacts list pre-created for the Team Site template as it did for previous versions.
Figure 3.13 The People and Groups page
Well, Someone Can Go Trolling New for SharePoint 3.0, the Recycle Bin is where all deleted items go for a specified amount of time (the default is thirty days). If a user deletes an item from the recycle bin, it will go to a “second stage,” site collection Recycle Bin controlled by the site collection administrator (all of this is configurable, but this
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is the default). After the items go to the site collection Recycle Bin, only a site collection administrator can recover the item. From there, the items are permanently deleted. Accidentally deleting important documents was a big problem with the previous version of SharePoint, so this is why the Recycle Bin makes its debut with two stages already built in. To insure that users can’t go trolling through the Recycle Bin looking at what others have thrown away, Security filtering applies to the Recycle Bin as well. This means that, usually, you can see only what you’ve deleted. However, if you are a site collection owner, you can see all deleted items at the site collection level, so you can recover them for someone else’s sake. Because the site level Recycle Bin only shows users the items they deleted, it is usually called the End users’ Recycle Bin.
Content Pages List and library content is displayed on content pages. These pages are designed specifically for viewing and managing lists. Lists and libraries are often differentiated from each other in common SharePoint parlance, but frankly they are the same thing. A list is a table of data stored in the content database. This table has rows and columns. Each row is a record, and each column is a field. Because lists are made up of columns and rows, it’s easy for Microsoft to integrate them with Excel, making it easy to create a list from a spreadsheet or export an existing list to a spreadsheet. Of course, you have to have Microsoft Excel for this (no other spreadsheet program is compatible to my knowledge), but the point is still made. Every list has fields for keeping track of who created a record, if that record is modified, when it was modified, and by whom. Because of this, you can track changes in a record, making it possible to trigger alerts when changes are made. You can trigger an alert based on whether anything changes in a list or whether or not an item you created or modified is changed. Further, because SharePoint knows when a new record is created or modified in a list, it’s pretty easy to do RSS feeds from there. As a result, lists are capable of doing alert and RSS feed actions. Lists are made unique by their intent. When you make a discussion list, for example, it’s for specific discussion-related things, such as discussion topics and replies. As a result, certain records (generically referred to as list items) can be marked as replies for other records that are considered topics. That means that records in a discussion can be differentiated between topics and replies. Document libraries, on the other hand, are lists that are intended to focus on the management of documents (other libraries simply manage other kinds of files). This means that their records contain a field meant to contain a file. That file’s file type and name are considered the focus of the record, and those fields are the first two generally displayed. Activities in a library are specific to what you might do to add, edit, or manage a document that might be stored in a record there. In other words, even libraries are lists. Lists can vary because they are intended to be used for different reasons. Generally they share the same content page layout, most of the tools, and other features of the interface. But they do have their differences, depending on what they were meant to be used for. This becomes somewhat important as the actions available per list vary depending on that list’s intent. For example, Discussions and Document Libraries should be used for different reasons and in different ways. Therefore, the interface for these two kinds of lists should differ to some degree, despite the standard content page interface. To see what I mean, let’s open a Discussion type list
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and then open the Document library and see what differences there are. This will familiarize you with both the content page interface and how they may vary.
A Quick Look at a List Click the Team Discussion link in the Quick Launch bar. It will open the Team Discussion page (Figure 3.14). The layout of this page has the standard site header content (Welcome menu, Help, Search, etc.) and the Quick Launch bar down the left side of the page. In the content area, are the following parts:
Figure 3.14 The Team Discussion content page
Where are the list items? Right now the content page as seen in Figure 3.14 is empty. You just need to see the attributes of these pages at this point. You’ll see how to fill them during the next several chapters.
Action Bar The Action bar refers to the buttons across the top of the content area that indicate what can be done to (or with) the contents of this list. Each item in the bar is actually a menu button, with additional options underneath it. Discussion lists have New, Actions, and Settings buttons on their Action bar. These are standard buttons for the Action bar, with pretty standard options underneath. New The New button simply gives you the option of creating a new record for this list (otherwise known as an item generically, and discussion topic when referred to in the context of a discussion list). When you click it, you will end up on a page that lets you fill in the fields for a discussion. The New button is a direct indication of whatever new items the list is capable of creating.
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Button versus Menu The New button can actually have more items beneath it depending on the list, so don’t be surprised if you come across a multitasking New button. Generally, like most things Microsoft, there is a default action a New button will take if you just click it rather than clicking its dropdown arrow. That’s one of the reasons I call these things “buttons” rather than “menus.” So when you see a button with a dropdown arrow next to it, realize that although it has a default action, there may be more under there than you think. This is where being curious comes in handy. Don’t be afraid to check the down arrow of any buttons, just in case they offer something unexpected.
Actions The Actions button drops down a menu containing options that offer to export the list to a spreadsheet, view the RSS feed of the list page and subscribe to it if you’d like, and set up Alerts. Some lists also allow you to view the list data itself in datasheet view. That means change the view of the list so it looks like a spreadsheet. The Discussion list is simply one of those lists that do not support that action.
Settings The Settings button acts just like the Site Actions menu, only it pertains to settings for this list, not for the whole site. This button drops down a menu containing options to create a new column or view for the list, or simply go to the more extensive Settings page to configure further list settings.
View Menu The View menu is a way to manipulate the view of this list’s data. Right now the default is Subject, and as a matter of fact that is the only view for this particular list. Also on the View menu is, reasonably enough, a link to modify the Subject view or create a new one.
Column Headers The column headers below the Action bar indicate the fields that are available in the list for this view. (Remember, views are like reports. You don’t need to display all the fields available in a list for a report.) This list view has fields for Subject, Created by, Replies, and Last Updated. What’s not shown on the list is the Body field of the item. To see the contents of the body of the discussion item, you would, logically, click on that item and open it to read it (very much like an email message in an inbox). The column headers, very much like an Excel spreadsheet, can be clicked to sort the list items, and even filter through the items to narrow down your search.
A Quick Look at a Document Library To see the differences and similarities between a list and a library content page, let’s check out the Shared Documents library (Figure 3.15). To do this, click the Shared Documents link in the Quick Launch bar. It will open into the Shared Documents content page. The layout of this page has the
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same standard site header content that the Team Discussion did and the Quick Launch bar down the left side of the page. In the content area are the following items:
Figure 3.15 The Shared Documents content page
The Action Bar Document library Action bars contain New, Upload, Actions, and Settings. There are some significant differences between the Action bar of a library and the Action bar of a list. Microsoft assumes that libraries can potentially be used to store many files and not necessarily in a straightforward, everything-in-one-long-list kind of way. In other words, administrators may want to break up a library into organizational subsets. For example, say you have a Marketing library, with marketing documents. And those documents the library will contain, were originally stored on a common fileshare, organized by campaigns. In order to make it more convenient and familiar to the users, you can also organize the Marketing document library by campaign by using folders, as if the library (whose contents are really stored in a database) were a fileshare. This gives the users a document storage structure with which they are familiar. In addition, users may want to add many files to a library at once. So the capability exists to create documents one by one, upload one or many documents at once, or even drag and drop documents from a fileshare or local folder to a document library. These options, which are pretty critical to a library, are not necessary for a discussion list, and therefore are not available for that list’s interface.
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Something About Folders Keep in mind that you can enable folder organization in other lists, but only in document libraries where it is enabled by default.
New The New button in the Shared Documents library can make two “new” things in the library: a Word document and a folder. This ability is just the tip of the iceberg concerning the things a document library can make, but it does indicate that the New button can do more than one thing. By default, it will create a new Word document, if you have a compatible word processor. That’s why the down arrow next to the New button is important, because to make a new folder in the library, you have to drop down the New menu to select it.
Upload A library always has an Upload button. This is to accommodate those documents that you’ve already made elsewhere and now want to add to the library. It’s as simple as that. You can choose to upload a file, or upload multiple files at once (if you have an Office 2003 or 2007 product installed on the computer you are uploading from), which is useful when you are building a library from existing documents on a file share somewhere. If the file already exists in the library, you will be prompted to overwrite it.
Actions The Actions button still lets you set alerts and an RSS feed for the library, but it specifically indicates that libraries have different activities than a discussion. Again, because Microsoft knew that you might need to add many items to the library in one go, the Actions button’s menu has two options that are particularly focused on bulk work: the Edit In Datasheet option and Open With Windows Explorer. Editing in datasheet can be done in some lists that might contain many items, like Contacts or Announcements. However, being able to open a list with Windows Explorer is specific to libraries. Edit in Datasheet: Because a library is a list, it can be opened and viewed (the library records itself, not the documents it holds) like a spreadsheet—indicating again that a list is just a table, with rows for records and columns for fields. In the same vein, the library can also be exported to a spreadsheet, just like the discussion list. The Edit in Datasheet option lets you create a bunch of library records as if you were creating them in Excel, which is much faster than clicking the New button, typing in the fields, clicking the Save button on that page, going back to the library, clicking the New button, and so on, to create the same number of records. Open with Windows Explorer. As mentioned, libraries are capable of having Windows Explorer-style web folders. This view affords users more comfortable with using fileshares a chance to look at the library as if it were a folder in the filesystem (rather than a table in a database). Also, some people felt it was not easy to upload files using the Upload Multiple Files page. They wanted to be able to select a bunch of files in a file share window and drop them into the library or even a particular folder in a library. You can do this with Open with Windows Explorer.
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What it does is open the library as an Explorer window. Then you can open the file share window, select the files you want, and then drag and drop them into the library’s Explorer window. A lot of copying will commence, and then voil`a! The files will be in the library (see Figure 3.16 for my example of first and second documents in the library).
Figure 3.16 The Open With Windows Explorer window
The Forms Folder An interesting thing about viewing a document library using Windows Explorer is it contains, without your assistance, a folder called Forms. This folder contains the forms that are used for the library, such as those for different ways to view the content of the page or the form used to upload files. Within the folder, the Webfldr file is actually the “Explorer view” listed in the View menu. The Repair Form, a troubleshooting tool, can be found in here as well, and it’s worth keeping in mind. This page will allow you to reconnect a document if it somehow becomes disconnected with its content type’s template.
Settings The Setting button (and its dropdown menu) is exactly like a normal list’s settings, containing the Create A Column, Create View, or Go to the Document Library’s Settings page.
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The View Menu This menu contains the views of this particular library. You can customize the views that come with this list and even create your own. Remember, a view is just a way of reporting the data in the underlying table. By default, the view is All Documents, but there is also an option to view the library in Explorer view, (since Explorer is already being used for file copying).
The Column Headers Each item in a library, like any list, is a record. This record has fields that contain data. In a library, records contain more than fields with text in them, they include one field that is required to contain a file. That’s the point of a library and why libraries are unique among SharePoint lists. The fields being displayed in the All Documents view of the library records are Type (which pertains to the type of file the record contains), Name (which is the filename of the file the record has), Modified (when the file or record was last modified), and Modified By (what user account made the modification). There are other fields in the library record that have to do with who created the record and when it was created, but they are not intended to be displayed in this view. Views can be modified or created to display as many or as few of the fields as you’d like. Normally, these fields are considered metadata about the document. However, due to the fact that most files (like Word files) refer to their metadata as properties, that’s what they are called in a document library. Properties, metadata, or record fields, this data can be sorted or filtered in the page by clicking on the column headers. From either content page (Shared Documents or Team Discussion), it’s easy to get back to the home page. You can use the breadcrumb above the page title, or you can click the Home tab in the Top Link Bar bringing you back to the home page where you started. At this point, you are ready to be introduced to the individual aspects of SharePoint.
The Bottom Line Identify the SharePoint navigation tools and figure out how to use them SharePoint makes a point of ensuring that a user always has a way to get where they need to go without using the Back button in the browser. Recognizing these features makes navigation easier and increases productivity. Master It library.
List three different ways to get back to the Home page should you be in a list or
Find a list or library SharePoint uses the Quick Launch bar as a quick, convenient, and consistent way for users to find the SharePoint lists and libraries they need to access. Master It
How do you find a list or library if it is not on the Quick Launch bar?
Use the Quick Launch bar The Quick Launch bar is more than a list of lists. It also contains an easy way to navigate through all contents of a site, access people and groups, check the Recycle Bin, and create new site contents. Master It By default, when SharePoint is initially installed, the Quick Launch bar does not have Surveys as a heading. Why?
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Use a breadcrumb Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 has instituted a navigational device that keeps track of where a user has been. This dynamic horizontal list lets a user jump back to where they started very conveniently without using the web browser’s Back button. Master It
Is there such a thing as a global breadcrumb? What is it?
Understand a content page Every list and library has a content page. This kind of page has a consistent layout to make working with it easy for users. Master It What is an Action bar? What’s on it, and why would it be different in a library than it would be in a list?
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Introduction to Web Parts Web parts are interesting additions to SharePoint. They were meant to be a convenient way to display things on the home page of SharePoint sites. They came in so handy that now they can be added to most of the pages of a SharePoint site. They needed to be resizable, movable, and self-contained. Somewhat like Konfabulator widgets, or sidebar gadgets, web parts are independent little applications that pull and display information from anywhere data might be available, such as the content database, file shares, or web pages. Numerous companies have been built on customizing SharePoint web parts into all kinds of useful things, probably well beyond the expectations of the original SharePoint developers. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to: ◆
Identify web parts
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Use Edit mode
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Distinguish between Personal and Shared views
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Work with web parts
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Export and import web parts
Exploring Web Parts Let’s first explore the out-of-the-box, no-need-for-coding web parts that any administrator can use. They are useful and often underused. To start, you need to be on the home page of your SharePoint site, so open IE and browse to your SharePoint server. (Mine is SP2.) Before the page loads, you’ll probably need to log in. (The example uses the SharePoint site collection administrator: dem0tek\shareadmin.) Once the site is up, you should be on the home page. Remember, that home pages are web part pages by default in SharePoint, but you can add web parts to most content pages. You can even create web part pages if you need to. However, the most convenient page to customize is the Home page. In the Web Part area of the Home page, you should see four web parts: ◆
The Announcements List View web part
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The Calendar List View web part
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The Image web part (where the SharePoint Services graphic is located)
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A Links List View web part
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Notice that each List View web part has a title that corresponds with the title of the list, an area below the title where (as you can see with the Announcements web part in Figure 4.1) the items in the list would be displayed, and an Add a new Item link, which will take you to the new item page for that list.
Figure 4.1 Home Page web parts
Corporate Collaboration Solution You may have noticed the words “Corporate Collaboration Solution” at the top of the web parts area of the Home page in Figure 4.1. When a site is created, and you fill in the description for the site, this is where the description goes. You may want to consider that when a creating your sites. For the purposes of the book, I may not always fill in the description field, but the option is always there for you to use as you see fit.
The Image web part is a simple web part that was meant to display an image file. It’s as easy as that. As a matter of fact, that brings me to an important concept. Web part developers rapidly realized that they were creating the same type of web parts over and over, with only the content of the web parts making them unique. There were web parts that contained list information, web parts that were meant to put a picture in the web part area of a page, and web parts that displayed content from a file or folder. Developers, therefore, created web part frames, or templates, to be filled with content later. Now you have built-in web parts that were meant to be customized. Two
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of my favorites are the Content Editor and Page Viewer web parts, which are meant to contain the content you create (via HTML or a Rich Text Editor) or the content of any file folder, document, or web page you specify.
Using Edit Mode To change, move, delete, or add a web part, you need to put the web part area of the page into Edit mode. There are two ways to do that, depending on whether you want to change the way you personally view the web parts on the home page (Personal version) or if you want to change the way everyone views the web parts on the home page (Shared version). Edit mode looks almost identical regardless of which version you are changing, so pay attention to which one you are editing by checking the information bar that occurs whenever you are in Edit mode. It will indicate what version of the page you are editing.
Whacky Terminology SharePoint has some terminology that it uses redundantly and in blatant conflict. I am talking about views and versions. When you are talking about Personal and Shared views of pages that contain web parts, SharePoint refers to them as both views and as versions. However, when you are talking about List Views, you are referring to the way that the underlying data for the list is displayed as in a report or chart. List views are also used to display data in a List View web part. Then there is the word “Version.” When you are talking about versions in terms of Lists, well, that’s when the list is configured to keep a version of a list item or file each time that item or file is edited. So there are versions of list items or documents, and versions of web part page views. I hope that clears things up, and helps explain why it might seem that I am using the terms interchangeably. I am only doing what Microsoft teaches me. In this chapter I am trying to use version in terms of Shared or Personal views because I also mention List View web parts in this chapter as well. In later chapters of the book, views mainly refer to Lists and Libraries, and versions are used in terms of list items and files.
Changing, moving, adding, and removing web parts from a page are all done the same way, regardless of whether you are in the Personal or Shared version of the page. I am going to start in my Personal version because it has one option that the Shared version does not have, the ability to roll back the changes to match the public, shared version. To edit the web part area of a page for your personal viewing only, you enter Edit mode from the Personalize this Page menu item on the Welcome menu. To do this, select the Welcome menu (top right of the page, next to the Help button). In the dropdown menu, select Personalize this Page. That will cause the web part area to go into Edit mode (see Figure 4.2).
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Figure 4.2 The home page in Edit mode
An information bar at the top of the web part area states “You are editing the Personal Version of this page.” That’s good to know. You don’t want to personalize the Shared version of the web page and ruin the consistent and familiar arrangement that users know and love. Pay attention to that information bar when you’re editing web parts.
Who Added Web Parts to My Personal Version of the Page? Don’tbe surprised if a web part shows up one day in your Personal version, when you know you did not put it there. A Personal version is based on the Shared version and is intended to essentially augment the Shared version. If a web part is added to the Shared version after you develop your Personal version, the new web part will appear in your Personal version as well. You will still be able to move it around, close it, or minimize it, depending on how the web part is configured.
What exactly happens in Edit mode? First, the web part area breaks into separate Web Part zones. These zones can stretch to contain as many web parts as you’d like. Although I find them pretty restrictive, they were intended to help organize the look of your web parts. I suggest you use those web parts sparingly. Fit as many as you can without having to scroll; users don’t really
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like to scroll. On the Team Site home page, the two Web Part zones (as you can see in the Figure 4.2) are labeled Left and Right. At the top of each zone is an Add a Web Part button, which opens its own window listing possible web parts to add to the zone. In addition, each web part’s title bar has changed a bit. They are now slightly orange (in the default theme for the site), with an Edit button and a Close button. If you click the Edit button, it can bring up a work pane on the right of the page (right over the right Web Part zone). This work pane will contain tools and properties specific to that particular web part.
Move a Web Part Moving a web part from one zone to another is easy and uncomplicated. Simply move your cursor over the title bar of the web part you’d like to move, and then drag it to the location in the other Web Part zone where you’d like to put it and drop it. The catch is, you can’t just drop the web part anywhere. It has to be put above, below, or between existing web parts in a zone. A horizontal I-beam marker lets you know where SharePoint thinks you’re putting the web part. (The I-beam is very much like the indicator that appears when you are dragging and dropping a file in a list of files or moving text in a document.) So with that in mind, and with the web part area in Edit mode, move the Image web part (called Site Image in my example) from the right Web Part zone to the left Web Part zone. It’s easy; just follow these steps:
1. Move your cursor over the title of the web part until it turns into a four-headed pointer (see Figure 4.3).
Figure 4.3 The right Web Part zone with a cursor over the title
2. Click and drag that title over to the other Web Part zone, and drop it between the other existing web parts. (Mine is going to go between the Announcements web part and the Calendar web part.) When you drop the web part, it will resize to match the width of the new zone (see Figure 4.4).
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Figure 4.4 The new location for the Image web part
Remove a Web Part from a Zone If you have a web part you don’t want to see on the home page, you can close it. This will remove it from the page, so it won’t take up space and you won’t see it. To close a web part, simply click the Close button (X) in the title bar. For example, to remove the Links web part from the page (it’s empty at the moment), simply click the X in its title bar. This closes the web part and removes it from the page, but it doesn’t delete it from the available web parts should you want to put it back. With it gone the right Web Part zone is empty (Figure 4.5). To see what Personal version of the home page looks like now that you have moved the Image web part and closed the Links web part you’ll need to close out of Edit mode. To do that, simply click the Exit Edit Mode link on the right side of the information bar. You will then get to see the effects of your handiwork (Figure 4.6). Notice that there is no real indication that you are looking at your Personal version of the page. This can be a challenge when trying to troubleshoot why a user can or cannot see a web part. The best way to be sure which version you are looking at is to use the Welcome menu. It is dynamic, and it will indicate which version you are in by offering a chance to change to the other version state. In other words, if you are in your Personal version of a page that you have edited, the Welcome menu should have two new menu items: Show Shared View (indicating that you are looking at the Personal version of the page) and Reset Page Content. SharePoint keeps track of the changes you made to your Personal version. If you messed up and want to return that web parts page to its original state, you can use that menu item to do so. To see what the page looks like in the Shared version of the page select that menu item from the Welcome menu. It will take you to the original Shared version, where none of your changes (the moved Image web part or the deleted Link web part from the page) are in effect. To return to the Personal view version, simply go to the Welcome menu and select it. Your personalized version of the page should return.
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Figure 4.5 An empty right Web Part zone
Figure 4.6 The new Personal version of the home page
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Personal Version and Permissions If the possibility for abuse of the personal version of pages is getting you down, you can disable the permission to use personal views, as well as deny adding and removing personal web parts for site members. See Chapter 11, “Users and Permissions” for more information.
Add a List View Web Part If you’d like to add a web part to one of the Web Part zones in your Personal version, simply go into Edit mode (Welcome ➢ Personalize This Page). I’d like to add the List View web part for the Team Discussion list, so I can quickly see if there are any new topics right on the home page. To do that, while in Edit mode, click the Add a Web Part button at the top of the Web Part zone in which you’d like to place a web part. In my example, let’s add a web part to the left zone, beneath the List View web part of the Calendar list:
1. Click the left zone’s Add a Web Part button. It will open an Add Web Parts to Left window. 2. As you can see in Figure 4.7, the window in the top section is called Lists and Libraries. In that window, select the Team Discussion web part by putting a check in its checkbox, and click Add.
Figure 4.7 The Add Web Parts To Left window
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This will, unfortunately, add the Team Discussion List View web part to the top of the left zone, but you can easily drag and drop it to fit snugly below the Calendar web part.
3. Once you have moved the Team Discussion web part to the bottom of the left Web Part zone, click Exit Edit Mode in the information bar below Site Actions. You should now see, in your Personal version of the page, a Team Discussion List View web part (see Figure 4.8) listed beneath Calendar.
Figure 4.8 A new Team Discussion web part
That’s how easy it is to add prebuilt List View web parts to a web parts page. Keep in mind that every time you create a new list or library, that a corresponding List View web part is created. This makes it possible for you (or your users) to add a List View web part for any list or library, to any page that can hold web parts on the site.
Reset Page Content It’s possible that you might regret the changes you have made to your personal version. If that happens, it’s easy to undo all of the changes you made to personalize the page. Simply go to the Welcome menu and select Reset Page Content. Selecting Reset Page Content will undo all the changes you have made and make your Personal version of the page match the Shared version; and as such, this option to reset is available only with the Personal version. Over time you may make extensive changes to your Personal version of the page. If you reset your page content, it will undo all the changes you have made, even the ones you wanted to keep. You will get a Warning dialog box reminding you that all changes will be undone (Figure 4.9).
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Figure 4.9 A Reset Page Content Warning dialog box
To Change the Shared View Changing the Shared view version of a page is done in the same way as changing the Personal version of one. Simply click the Site Actions menu (instead of the Welcome menu), and select Edit Page. The page will go into Edit mode, and the information bar will indicate that you are editing the shared version of the page. Again, the Web Part zones will be outlined and have an orange button at the top to add a web part. All web parts displayed will show their title bars, and an Edit and Close button will be available. All changes made in Edit mode of the Shared version will change the web parts for all users who share that view. You can move, add, modify, and remove web parts in this view just as you could with the Personal version, except for two things: ◆
This is the view that will be used by and be available to everyone by default. If you make changes here, you are doing so without a safety net (in front of everyone who logs into the site). If you make a mistake and want to reset to the original content, you will have to undo your changes manually.
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There is no Reset Page Content for the Shared version of the page. That feature only exists for the personalized version because that version is based on the Shared version. You can restore closed web parts to the page by using the closed Web Parts Gallery, but there is no one-click undo for the Shared version of a page.
Working with Web Parts Now that you know the difference between Personal and Shared versions of a page and you know how to move, remove, and add existing web parts to a page, it’s time to start really working with them. To do that, though, you need to understand how web parts are organized. They are generally organized by galleries. There are site collection galleries, server galleries, and the “recycle bin” of galleries, the closed web parts. That gallery contains all the web parts you may have closed from viewing on a web page, but otherwise aren’t done with it yet (closed web part galleries are per page). Getting to web part galleries isn’t that easy, unfortunately. To use web part galleries, you first need to access the Add Web Parts page by going into Edit mode, then clicking a Add a Web Part bar. Then click the link “Advanced web part gallery and options” located at the bottom of the page. This will open a tool pane with the galleries listed. We will be doing this together later in the chapter.
No Gallery for Online Web Parts The previous version of SharePoint had another gallery for online web parts. That gallery is not available in this version of SharePoint. Although the possibility of using online, dynamically updating web parts is still open, Microsoft is just not going to be responsible for offering them or maintaining a gallery for them, at this point. So if you were wondering where that gallery went, well, now you know.
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To make web parts available in SharePoint (that aren’t already there by default), you can import them to the site collection or server galleries. The Site Collection Gallery, as its name implies, holds the web parts for an entire site collection. This means a top-level site and all its subsites can add web parts from that gallery. If you have a different site collection, it will not have those imported web parts by default (which stands to reason). The Site Collection Gallery usually is named after the top level site (in my case, that would be Company Site). If you import a web part to the Server Gallery, however, the web part will be available to all site collections in the web application or even all web applications on the server farm, depending on how it is added to SharePoint.
Default Web Parts A number of web parts come with SharePoint by default. They are organized into two groups, Lists and Libraries, and All web parts (which strangely does not include lists and libraries): Lists and Libraries The List and Library List View web parts were designed to conveniently display the contents of their list or library and give users an easy way to add items to those lists. By default, these lists are available for a Team site: ◆
Announcements: Can be used to post messages on the home page of the site.
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Calendar: Allows you to keep up-to-date on shared events, meetings, and deadlines.
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Links: Used to display links that may be useful for other site members.
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Shared Documents: Displays documents in the Shared Documents library.
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Tasks: Allows users to keep track of tasks that need to be completed.
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Team Discussion: Allows users to keep track of the topics being discussed in this newsgrouplike list.
New Lists and Libraries Get List View Web Parts Too Templates exist for other lists and libraries, as well as the option to create custom lists from scratch. These List View web parts are for the lists and libraries that were prebuilt when the top-level site was created. They are not the limit of the lists and libraries you might end up with, and for each, a List View web part is automatically created.
All Web Parts Most of these web parts are empty templates of a type of web part that requires some configuration to function properly. The exceptions to that rule are the following three web parts: ◆
Site Users: This web part is a kind of List View web part for the People and Groups list. By default it gives you a quick way to click on a site group to bring up a list of users contained therein. The catch is that it defaults to display, innocently, the different SharePoint groups, even though the user logged in is not permitted to view the contents of those groups. This leads them to click on a group and be denied access. To offset this, you can configure the web part to display the SharePoint group for the current user. In addition, like all List View web parts, there is a link to add a user, even for a user who might not have the right to add users.
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The user will be refused when they attempts to add a user to the site (to avoid this you can set the web part to display no toolbar—this will disable the add a user link). ◆
User Tasks: This web part displays any tasks that are assigned to the current user. This means, depending on who is logged in and viewing the home page, the User Tasks web part will display the tasks only for that user. The interesting thing about this web part is it will pick up tasks from any task list, as long as the Tasks List template was used to create it. It won’t recognize a custom list, even if you call it “Tasks.”
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Relevant Documents: This web part displays any document or picture a user modified in any library, except a wiki library, on the site. It is site specific. This web part can be configured to display library files that the user has modified, created, or checked out, although by default it shows only those modified by the user.
Aggregating Content Both the User Tasks and Relevant Documents act as item aggregators for their content. They combine all the tasks or files relevant to a user, regardless of the task list or library the item is actually in.
The rest of the miscellaneous web parts are considered the built-in web part templates: ◆
Content Editor Web Part: This web part can be configured to hold a rich-text document containing tables, images, text, or hyperlinks, or HTML. It is used to add rich, static content to a web part page.
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Form Web Part: This web part is a simple, one-field form that can be used to look up information from a different List View web part. The web part makes it convenient to do a quick search of information in a web part (such as for an event in the Calendar) right on the home page.
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Image Web Part: This web part is meant to contain an image file. That’s it.
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Page Viewer Web Part: This web part is actually pretty nifty. It can display the contents of a file, folder, or web page. This means that you can link this web part to a file share on the network, and make those files available to the users (provided they have the right to access that folder).
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XML Web Part: This web part was meant to display XML (or transformed XML) pages.
As an administrator, when you are moving, adding, or removing web parts from a page, you first need to decide whether you want the change to occur in your Personal version or the Shared version of the page. Not all users are allowed to change the Shared version of a page, but everyone can be affected by it. By default, only the site owners group members are allowed to change the Shared version. This means that, as an administrator, you have a responsibility to the users to lay out the Shared version of the web parts on your pages well. I am going to prepare my Company site for users by adding the User Tasks and Relevant Documents web parts. When users log in, they will quickly see the tasks and files relevant to them. Then I’ll configure the settings for the Relevant Documents web part so it will be more informative for the user.
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Finally I’ll look into the advanced options concerning adding web parts, work with a built-in web part, and visit the galleries (as well as take a quick look at importing web parts). This all will be done in the Shared version of the home page, of course, for maximum impact. To edit the Shared version of the home page, click the Site Actions menu, and select Edit Page. You will now be in Edit mode of the Shared version (as the information bar will tell you).
Add User-Aware Web Parts To start adding user-aware web parts, let’s add the User Tasks and Relevant Documents web parts to the right Web Part zone.
1. Click on the Add a Web Part button at the top of the right zone. This will open an Add Web Parts to Right window. Because there are checkboxes next to each preexisting web part (or web part template), you can select more than one. This is a convenient feature when you are quickly populating a page with web parts.
2. In this example, the web parts that need to be added to the Shared version of the home page of the company site are not part of the Lists and Libraries group. Locate the User Tasks and Relevant Documents under All Web Parts, Miscellaneous.
3. Select the User Tasks web part and the Relevant Documents web part by placing checks in their checkboxes (see Figure 4.10). Click Add.
Figure 4.10 Add multiple web parts to the right zone
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4. They are now located at the top of the right Web Part zone of the home page. If you want them below the site Image web part, drag and drop them just beneath that Image web part.
5. To see what the users will see, exit Edit mode by clicking Exit Edit Mode in the information bar. Notice that the new web parts widen the right zone a little (Figure 4.11).
Figure 4.11 New web parts in the right Web Part zone
The two web parts are ready for users. Now when a user gets assigned a task, it will show up in the User Tasks web part, and when they modify a document, it will show up in Relevant Documents. It would also be nice to display any document that someone might have checked out. This way, it will be listed in their Relevant Documents if they forget about it. To ensure that the Relevant Documents web part is configured to show checked out documents, we will have to check its settings. If it is not configured to also display the documents that the user has checked out, we can set it to do so.
Change Web Part Settings When you add a web part to a Web Part zone, it may require some additional customization. To do that, you will need to modify or edit the web part. Choosing to modify or edit a web part opens a tool pane on the right side of the page (smack dab on top of the right Web Part zone, actually) containing the properties and settings for that web part.
Remember Your Version! Remember what page version you were in when you added a web part when it comes time to configure it. Some settings for web parts are not available if you are not editing it in the original page version.
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To edit a web part’s settings, simply click the down arrow on the right side of the web part title. In this example, we’ll edit the Relevant Documents web part. The Modify Web Part menu will drop down (see Figure 4.12), displaying these options:
Figure 4.12 Modify the Web Part dropdown
Minimize Rolls up the web part as if it were a window shade. It hides the contents and shows the title bar of the web part. This option is useful for conserving vertical space on a crowded web page. The Minimize menu item becomes Restore when the web part is minimized. Close Closes the web part in this view, but keeps it available for reuse on this page in the closed Web Parts Gallery. Web parts are often extensively configured, so this feature allows for an accidental closure without forcing someone to re-create and reconfigure that web part again. Keep in mind that the closed Web Part Gallery is unique per page. Modify Shared Web Part Allows you to see the properties, and configure the settings of, a web part. It opens the tool pane for that web part on the right side of the page. Unfortunately, it obscures the right Web Part zone. Export Saves the web part (and its settings) to a web part definition (.dwp) file so you can export a great web part elsewhere. Not all web parts can be exported.
Missing Modify Only those users allowed to modify web part settings will see the down arrow in the title of a web part. If it is missing, you don’thave the right to change web parts in the page version you are using. Otherwise you can edit a web part’s settings while in Edit mode by clicking on the Edit button in the web part’s title bar. To modify the web part, choose Modify Shared Web Part. (The word “shared” is a nice reminder that this is going to impact more than just your Personal version of the page.) This will trigger a Web Part tool pane to pop out of the right side of the page. The contents of a web part’s tool pane vary, depending on that web part. As you can see in Figure 4.13, the Relevant Documents tool pane contains sections for: Appearance This section contains settings that allow you to change the title of the web part, the web part’s width and height, and the chrome state and type. Which controls the title bar and border around a web part or its “chrome.” Layout These settings control whether or not the web part is hidden or displayed, if the web part content is aligned with the right margin or left, what zone the web part is in, and in what order the web part is placed in a zone. Web parts that do a task programmatically, such as trigger reminders, but otherwise have nothing to display should be hidden.
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Figure 4.13 Relevant Documents Web Part Tool Pane
Advanced This section varies greatly depending on the web part. Primarily, it is focused on what users are allowed to do with the web part (minimize, close, hide, move), even if they can edit it in their Personal version. You can also specify the title of the web part as a URL, so a user is taken to a specific page when its title is clicked. You can specify the location of the icons used by the web part, specify how to export the web part, even specify the error message that comes up if someone tries to import the web part and it fails. Data This section is not available for most web parts. It is used to manage what data is displayed in the web part, such as limiting how many items will be displayed in the web part at one time, or what kind of data will be included in the web part’s display.
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To configure the web part to display checked out documents we are going to change a data setting for the Relevant Documents. In the tool pane, go to the Data section (click the Data heading to open the section), as shown in Figure 4.14.
Figure 4.14 The Data section
In the Data section, you can set the Relevant Documents web part list to include documents last modified by me, created by me, or even checked out to me (the “me” indicates that it is relative to the user logged in at the time). In addition, it offers to make each listed item a link to itself in its appropriate library, and limits the documents displayed to 15. To include the documents that have been checked out on the Relevant Documents list, add a check to the box next to the option that includes documents checked out to me. Also, it might be a good idea to conserve space in the web part by only listing the documents the user is actively working on and has checked out. Therefore you might not want to display every document the user has modified. To do that, clear the checkbox for including documents last modified by me. Once you have configured your settings, click OK. That should bring you back to the web page.
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Add a Built-in Web Part The built-in web part templates are a convenient way to add additional web parts to the home page. For example, we could add a reminder that vacation requests are due for most employees. To add content to a page using a web part is easy. The only limitation is the design of the Web Part zones themselves. To be sure to reach as many users as possible, the reminder should be placed on several pages (Shared version of course) of the site. In this case, let’s put it on the home page and the Calendar page.
All Non-Administrative Pages are Web Part Pages Remember, all non-administrative pages in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 are web part pages. This means that web parts can be added to any list, library, or home page you might have. It really gives you more flexibility and control over what information is displayed where. However, it can also be tempting to make list pages too busy or confusing. I suggest that you refrain from putting much, if anything, on pages that contain lists or libraries so users can concentrate on the tasks at hand.
To create a vacation reminder let’s use the Content Editor web part. This web part uses content from a rich-text or HTML file to display data. It doesn’t have a complex editorial environment, but it is useful. For this example, let’s add a Content Editor web part to the web page, give it a unique title, and then set it so the users cannot close it in their personal versions. Then to configure it we need to go into the Rich Text Editor and add some content.
1. To add a Content Editor web part to the page, you need to be in Edit mode. Click Site Actions and select Edit Page to go into Edit mode in the Shared version of the page.
2. While in Edit mode, decide which Web Part zone you want to add the web part to. I am going to use the left Web Part zone because that’s where people’s eyes tend to go first.
3. Click the Add a Web Part button at the top of the left Web Part zone. That will open the Add Web Parts to Left window.
4. In the All Web Parts, Miscellaneous list is the Content Editor web part. Put a check mark in the box next to it to select it, and click the Add button at the bottom of the window. This will bring you back to the home page in Edit mode, with the new Content Editor web part listed at the top of the left Web Part zone (see Figure 4.15).
Configure a Built-In Web Part As you can see in Figure 4.15 the new web part requires configuration. It’s empty of content, just a shell based on the Content Editor Web Part template. To add content to this web part, you will need to open the tool pane. You can open the tool pane for this web part by clicking the down arrow in the web part’s title bar and selecting modify shared web part, or, if you are in edit mode, just click the Open The Tool Pane link listed in the web part itself. Of course, the tool pane opens on the right of the page, covering the web parts beneath it. The first section of the tool pane is the Content Editor section (Figure 4.16). The headings for the Appearance, Layout, and Advanced sections are below that, of course.
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Figure 4.15 The new Content Editor web part
Figure 4.16 The Tool Pane Content Editor section
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Before editing the content of the web part, you must do something about the web part name. Best practice dictates that when you add and configure a web part on a web page, you must give it a unique name. This makes it possible to easily identify it among other web parts in a gallery, export and import it elsewhere, and can find it more easily by name in the Closed Web Parts Gallery. To give the web part a unique title, open the Appearance section of the tool pane. To do that, click the plus sign next to Appearance in the tool pane. The first field in that section is the Title field. It currently holds the default name for this web parts type. Enter a unique name for this web part in that Title field. My example uses Vacation Request.
Other Appearance Settings For the other settings in this section, you could specify the exact fixed height and width for this web part, but I prefer to let the web part fit the zone automatically. This allows the web part to best fit the zone regardless of the user’s screen resolution. You can also decide whether or not the web part will have a title bar (the Site Image web part is set to not have a title bar, for example) or borders. I would like the title bar to remain. This is why I am leaving those settings at this point. While we are here, this web part needs to be locked so those users who have a right to use a Personal version of the page cannot actually close or hide this while in their Personal version. That setting is located in the Advanced section. Open the Advanced section, and remove the check marks from the Allow Close and Allow Hide settings. This disables the user’s right to close or hide this web part, even in their Personal version of the page. They can still minimize it, but they cannot say they didn’t realize it is there because they’ll be able to see the title bar. Once those settings are complete, click the Apply button at the bottom of the tool pane to make sure they are applied before we continue. Now that the pre-editing configuration of the web part is done, we can move on to content editing:
1. To actually add content to the web part, scroll back up to the top of the tool pane if necessary. The Content Editor section gives you three options to add content to the web part. You can use the Rich Text Editor, create HTML source material (or cut and paste from some HTML source code), or simply supply the URL of an existing file.
If the Content Editor Fails Be aware that the Content Editor web part was not really meant to display web pages that contain
